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English Pages [385] Year 1969
^N. -
The Medieval Mind
A
Contents of
History of Western Philosophy, second edition
Mind
I.
The
1
Pre-Socratic Philosophy
Classical
The Theory
Forms
of
5
2 Education Through Violence
The Special Sciences
Plato:
7 Aristotle: Ethics,
Natural Science, Logic
Politics,
Art
/
6 /
3 Atomism Aristotle:
8 The Late
/
4
Plato:
Metaphysics,
Classical Period
The Medieval Mind
II.
1
/
The New Religious Orientation
God
the Creator /
/
2
The Formative Years
Christianity:
4 Augustine: The Created Universe
6 Thomas: Metaphysics / 7 Thomas: Psychology,
/
Ethics,
3 Augustine:
5 The Medieval Interval / Politics 8 The End of the
Middle Ages III.
1
Hobbes
to
Renaissance
5 Descartes IV.
,
Hume 2 Reformation
6 Spinoza
/
3 Science and
7 Leibniz
,
8 Locke
/
Scientific
9 Berkeley
Method / 4 Hobbes 10 Hume /
/
Kant to Wittgenstein and Sartre
1
The Age
4
Reactions Against Kantianism: Hegel and Schopenhauer
of
Reason
and Social Philosophy
'
2 Kant: Theory /
of
Knowledge
'
3 Kant: Theory of Value / 5 Science, Scientism,
6 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche / 7 Three Philosophies of The Analytical Tradition: Russell and
Process: Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead / 8
Wittgenstein / 9 The Phenomenological Tradition: Husserl and Sartre
W. T. JONES Pomona
College
The
Medieval Mind A History of Western Philosophy SECOND EDITION
\^
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@
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in
OF COPYRIGHTS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LIST
The author
records his thanks for the use of the selections reprinted in this book by permission
of the following publishers
BURNS
&
GATES LTD.
and copyright holders: from Stimma Contra Gentiles by Thomas Aquinas, translated by
for cxccrpts
the English Dominican Fathers.
CHATTO AND wiNDUs LTD.
for cxccrpts
from Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus, Kings
Classics.
J.
M.
DENT
&
SONS LTD. for cxccrpts from The Romance of the Rose, translated by F.
S. Ellis.
LivERiGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION foF cxcerpts from The Confessions of Saint Augustine, translated and annotated by J. G. Pilkington, M.A. Reprinted by permission of Liveright, Publishers, New York.
THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, Ciardi. Copyright
©
The New American
INC., for exccrpts
1957, 1959, 1960,
Library, Inc.,
RANDOM HOUSE,
INC., for exccrpts
by A. C.
Copyright 1945 by
Pegis.
New
from The Piirgatorio by Dante, translated by John
and 1961 by John
Ciardi. Reprinted
by arrangement with
York.
from Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Vols. I and II, edited Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
SAINT John's college bookstore for excerpts from
On
the Division of Nature
by John Scotus
Erigena, translated by C. Schwartz.
CHARLES scribner's SONS for exccrpts from The History of Christian Thought, pp. 75-229, by Arthur C. McGiffert. Copyright 1933 by Charles Scribner's Sons; renewal copyright 1961 by Gertrude H. Boyce McGiffert. And for excerpts from Selections of Medieval Philosophers, Vol. I,
©
pp. 91-254, and Vol.
II,
pp. 313-30, edited and translated by R.
Charles Scribner's Sons; renewal copyright
©
McKeon. Copyright 1929 by
1957. Reprinted with the permission of Charles
Scribner's Sons.
GRACE H. TURNBULL for exccrpts from the Enneads by Plotinus, translated by Stephen MacKenna, from The Essence of Plotinus, edited by Grace H. TumbuU. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS for cxccrpts reprinted from The Complete Bible, translated by M. P. Smith and E. J. Goodspeed, by permission of The University of Chicago Press. Copyright 1923 and 1948 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published 1923. Twenty-fifth
J.
Anniversary Edition 1948.
THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS by R. B. Burke.
for exccrpts
from Opus Mttjus by Roger Bacon, translated
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS for exccrpts from The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages by Marshall Clagett. Copyright 1959 by the University of Wisconsin Press. Reprinted by per-
©
mission of the copyright owners, the Regents of the University of Wisconsin.
I
r©TaC©
The changes incorporated into this revision of A History of Western Philosophy reflect what I have learned, in the seventeen years since the book was first pubhshed, about the history of philosophy, the nature of the philosophical enter-
and the role that philosophy plays in the general culture. They also good deal of thought about what characteristics make a textbook
prise itself, reflect a
useful.
The most noticeable innovation volumes:
I.
The Classical Mind;
and IV. Kant
to
expansion of the
way
in
Wittgenstein
II.
and
text, especially in
which courses
the division of the book into four separate The Medieval Mind; III. Hobbes to Hume;
is
Sartre.
This division has provided space for
the fourth volume.
in the history of
philosophy are
It also
now
conforms to the
organized and enables
the reader to choose the periods on which he wishes to concentrate.
In
my
revision
I
have been able to condense and at the same time clarify I have greatly simplified the elaborate
the exposition materially. In addition,
VIII
PREFACE
first edition, for I beheve that today's generano longer needs such a complex set of guideposts. The condensation of material and the elimination of superfluous heads have allowed me to expand the discussions of a number of thinkers and to add discussions of many others who were omitted from the earlier edition. For instance, in Volume I,
system of subheadings used in the tion of students
I
have added a short section on axiomatic geometrv and a longer section on Greek
Scepticism, with extracts from the writings of Sextus Empiricus. In
Volume
II,
have added a discussion of Gnosticism and have balanced this with a section on physical theory in the late Middle Ages, illustrated by quotations from John I
Biu-idan. It
The
Volume IV, however, that contains the most extensive additions. on Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche have been completely rewritten and
is
sections
greatly expanded; there are entirely
new
Husserl, and Sartre.
chapters on Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein,
—
—
There are also a great many changes some of them major in my interpretaand evaluation of individual thinkers and their theories. For instance, I have softened my criticisms of Greek Atomism and of Augustine, and in the sections on St. Paul and on the author of the Foiirth Gospel I have taken account of recent scholarship. There is, indeed, hardly a page that has not undergone extensive revision. This edition is a thoroughgoing and rigorous updating of the first tion
version.
Despite
all
these alterations,
my
point of view remains basically the same.
In revising, as in originally writing, this history, principles
— concentration,
I
have been guided by four
contextuahsm, and the use of original
selectivity,
sources.
An
historian of philosophy can either say something,
who
everyone
secutive account of a
many for
number
brief,
about
of representative thinkers, omitting discussion of
second- and third-flight philosophers.
two
however
philosophized, or he can limit himself to giving a reasonably con-
reasons. First,
I
have chosen the latter approach, the first approach are already
many works based on
and I see no good reason for adding to their number. Second, such works are likely to be unintelligible to the beginning student. I still recall my own bewilderment as an undergraduate in seeking to imderstand a complicated available,
down"
summary. The principle of few theories than to be superficially acquainted with a great many. But concentration imphes selectivity, and I can hardly hope that even those who accept the principle of concentration will approve all my selections. There will probably be no difference of opinion about the great figures of the remote past. Everyone will surely agree that Plato and Aristotle are the masters of their age. And perhaps there will be general agreement that Augustine and Thomas occupy similar positions in the Middle Ages that Augustine demands more attention than, say, Boethius, and Thomas more attention than Dims Scotus. But how is one to choose among philosophers of more recent times? Here one must try to anticipate the judgment of time. To some extent, I have theory that some expositor had "boiled
concentration rests on the thesis that
it is
to a
better to understand a
—
PREFACE
simply avoided the issue by dealing with more philosophers in the
The
modem
two volumes cover more than two millenia, the last two focus on hardly more than four hundred years. Even so, I have been forced to be selective by my determination that here, as in the earlier periods, I would not mention a philosopher unless I could deal with his views in some detail. Thus I have repressed a natural desire at least to mention Fichte and Schelling, in order to provide extended analyses of Hegel and Schopenhauer. All these thinkers represent reactions to Kantianism, and period.
result
is
although they differ select
that,
whereas the
among themselves
and concentrate on a few than
first
in
to
many
ways,
it is
better,
I
believe, to
attempt to give a complete enumer-
ation.
Also miderlying the writing of this history is the generally recognized but seldom adopted principle that philosophers are men, not disembodied spirits. Some histories of philosophy treat theories as if they were isolated from
everything except other philosophical theories. But all the great philosophers have actually been concerned with what may be called "local" problems. To be understood, their theories must be seen as expressions doubtless at a highly conceptualized level of the same currents of thought and feeling that were moving the poets and the statesmen, the theologians and the playwrights, and the ordinary men, of the age. Otherwise, how could their philosophies ever have been accepted? These philosophers furnished satisfactory answers only because they were alert to the problems that were exercising their contemporaries and because they were harassed by the same doubts. The cultural milieu in which a given philosophy emerges can be ignored only at the risk of making the philosophy seem a detached (and so meaningless and inconsequential) affair. In carrying out this principle I have begun my account of Greek philosophy
—
—
by describing the state of affairs in Athens at the end of the Pelopormesian War, and I have drawn on the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes to illustrate the
mood
of the times. This,
central thesis
I
believe,
is
a necessary setting for Plato, because his
— the theory of forms — was an attempt to answer the scepticism
and cynicism of his age. Plato's insistence on the existence of "absolute" standards for conduct and for knowledge is imderstandable only as a reflection of the social, economic, and political chaos and the moral and religious collapse that occurred at the end of the fifth century.
my discussion of medieval philosophy
is prefaced with an account have tried to indicate the rich and diversified cultural background within which Christian philosophy developed. In discussing the theories of Augustine and Thomas I have kept in mind that, whereas Augustine expressed the eschatological fervor of a new sect fighting
Similarly,
of the dissolving
Roman Empire, and
I
its life, Thomas embodied the serenity of an imperial and universal religion whose piety had been softened by a new sense of responsibility for "that which
for
is
Caesar's." Finally, in discussing the
tried to
show the many
development of early modem philosophy I have exploration and discovery, the rise of money
factors
—
IX
PREFACE
power, Humanism, the Reformation, and above all the new scientific method that combined to overthrow the medieval synthesis and to create new problems that philosophy even today is struggling to resolve. In a word, I have conceived the history of philosophy to be a part of the general history of culture and hence to
be
intelligible only in its cultural context.
The fourth pline, for that
principle
matter
is
my
conviction that in philosophy
— nothing takes the place of a
— or in any
disci-
and painsmuch to be
direct, patient,
taking study of a great and subtle mind. For this reason there
is
book alone has serious limitations, because its selections are apt to be discontinuous and difficult to follow. The advantage of a text is that it can explicate obscure passages and draw comparisons. Even so, explication and interpretation are not substitutes for the said for the use of a source book. But a source
dociunents themselves. Therefore, each of the volumes in this series stands halfway between textbook and source book and tries to combine the advantages of both:
have
I
set
own words by a careful and have bound these together with my own comThe quoted passages constitute about one third of the con-
out a philosopher's thought in his
selection of key passages
ment and
criticism.
tents.
To imdertake context
to give
an account of the history of philosophy
in its cultural
a formidable and perhaps presumptuous task for a single expositor.
is
In this undertaking
I
have received help from a wide variety of sources. In
I shall
not
who have read and commented on the first edition, whose names repeat here, I wish to thank many friends and colleagues who have
called
my
attention to points that needed correction:
addition to those
Stanley M. Daugert,
Stewart C. Easton, Robert L. Ferm, John H. Gleason, Douglas Greenlee, Raymond Lindquist, Edwin L. Marvin, James A. McGilvray, Philip Merlan, John E, Smith, Robert T. Voelkel, Culver G. Warner, Rev. Yost, Jr. I
am much
indebted to Robert
J.
S. Y.
Fogelin, from
Watson,
whom
I
S.J.,
and R. M.
learned a great
we taught a joint coiu-se on nineteenth-century philosophy, and to Clark Glymour, who has sent me extensive notes, especially on the history of science. My greatest appreciation is due to Cynthia A. Schuster, who read the
deal during the years
—
and III and commented in immense and Stephen A. Erickson, on whom I have constantly leaned for advice about matters small as well as great and whose detailed comments both on the first edition and on successive drafts of the revision have revised version of Volumes
immensely helpful
—
detail,
I,
II,
and
to
been invaluable. These readers have saved me from many errors of fact and interpretation; for errors that remain I must be responsible, and I shall be grateful if any that come to notice are pointed out to me. I am obliged to the many publishers and copyright holders (listed on pages iv-v) through whose cooperation the quotations used in these volumes appear. Since I have followed the style of the various writers and translators I have quoted, there is some variation in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation in the reprinted passages. Full bibliographical notes, keyed to the text by letters rather than numbers, appear at the end of each volume.
PREFACE
For the secretarial work on the manuscript I am chiefly indebted to Helen Armstrong, Dorothy Overaker, Catherine Tramz, and Judith Strombotne, who divided the typing. I am also grateful to Paul Cabbell, who checked all references in the
first
three volumes and
who performed
made many helpful
suggestions, to Joan McGilvray, volume, and to my good friend generously allowed me to impose on her the
a similar function for the
Margaret L. Mulhauser,
who
last
onerous task of proofreading.
W.
T. Jones
XI
Contents
vii
xvii
Preface Introduction
1 1
1
The New Religious Orientation
2
The Mystery Cults
6
Neoplatonism
8
Plotinus
9
21
34
The Coming of Christianity The Jewish Heritage The Jesus Movement
Jesus:
CONTENTS
XIV
38
38 50 54 60
1
Christianity:
The Mysticism
The Formative Years
of Paul
John and the Logos Mystery
The
Effects of Institutionalism
Heresy and Orthodoxy
72
Augustine: God the Creator
72
His Life and Times
75
The Inner Struggle Augustine's Concept
83 85 94 00
of
God
Properties of God-Reality
Providence, Evil, and Free Will
The Basic
Conflict in Augustine's Account of
102
Augustine: The Created Universe
1 02 105 105
The Two Cities: Heaven and Hell The Earthly Pilgrimage
1
1
5
Man Augustine's Ethics
120 1 28 133 136
The Drama
139
The Medieval
1
40
142 1
53
of Salvation
Nature and Natural Science History
Conclusion
The Dark Ages The Church Feudalism
Interval
God
CONTENTS
156 1
Chivalry Art and Letters
6
166
Science
1
7
The
1
72
Philosophy During the Medieval Interval
Universities
72 185
John Scotus Erigena
90 196 206
Abelard
208
Thomas: Metaphysics
209 212
The Central Problem
1
1
2
1
6
The Controversy over Universals
The Faith-Reason Controversy
Summary
Basic Concepts
Proofs of God's Existence
223 233 239
God's Nature
242
Thomas: Psychology,
243 257 272 278 285
The Physical World Angels
Ethics, Politics
Psychology Ethics Politics
Grace, Predestination, and the Moral Life
Conclusion
8 287
The End
287 289 299
Inhibitions of Orthodoxy
3
William of Occam
1
6
326
of the Middle
Roger Bacon
Duns Scotus The
Averroists
Ages
XV
XVI
CONTENTS
329
Notes
337
Suggestions for Further Reading
341
Glossary
349
Index
Introduction
first Christians were only a very small minority in an indifferent and even hostile empire, and because they alone anticipated the imminent arrival of the day of judgment, they lacked the social, political, and cultural interests of the ancient world. They were intent upon their own salvation, and they believed that this salvation would be assured by faith in Christ, the risen Lord. Medieval philosophy was born when these Christians discovered that simple piety no
Because the
longer satisfied them, and
when
the desire to understand revived. Unfortimately
smooth development of a Christian philosophy, the Christians' beliefs the Judaic inheritance, the teachactually stemmed from a variety of sources ings of Jesus, the experiences of the first disciples, the mystery cults, and an overlay of late Hellenistic speculation. (Chapter 1.) It was extremely difficult to organize these disparate notions into a coherent body of doctrine, and the formative centuries of Christianity were dominated by a series of struggles to eliminate heresy and to establish orthodoxy. (Chapter 2.) for the
—
XVIII
INTRODUCTION
Augustine played an important role in to explain
why God had
allowed
Rome
this
work.
He wrote
the City of
God
to fall victim to the barbarians, but
he
more than a clever publicist and apologist. Augustine's attempts to justify God's ways led him to make a thorough analysis of both the divine nature and human nature. His conception of God was greatly influenced always within the framework of the canonical writings by profound personal experiences: his was
far
—
—
sense of
sin, his
feeling of utter inability to save himself, his appreciation of the
redeeming grace that flowed to him from outside. (Chapter 3.) But Augustine was never able to reconcile his convictions about God's infinitude (and man's corresponding finitude) with the necessity for attributing free will to man in order to absolve God from responsibility for man's sin. (Chapter 4.) For centuries after the death of Augustine there was little philosophical activity
— these were dark ages indeed. Gradually, however, learning and culture
revived, and universities
were founded. Meanwhile, the Church, too, was changDespite a nostalgia for the simplicity and otherworldliness displayed by the early Christians, the Chiu-ch acquired social and political power in becoming a ing.
great this-worldly institution, with the responsibilities that this
power
— and the temptations
entailed. (Chapter 5.)
Philosophical speculation during the latter part of the Middle Ages was chiefly concentrated
on ascertaining the
status of universals (a
problem that had
theological as well as epistemological implications) and on defining and delimit-
ing the respective spheres of faith and reason. In the course of these investigations, the
instruments of logical analysis were greatly refined and the Scholastic
method was
devised. All this prepared the
way
for Aquinas' synthesis of classical
learning with Christian insights. Aquinas reinterpreted the traditional Christian
view
of the divine nature in terms of the basic Aristotelian concepts of
matter, actuality and potentiahty. This synthesis was a
much more
and formally complete metaphysics than Augustine had been able (Chapter
to
form and
consistent
work
out.
Furthermore, Aquinas' theories of psychology, ethics, and politics reflected both his own interest in this world and its aff^airs and the changed position
6.)
and fimctions of the Roman Church. (Chapter
7.)
After Aquinas, philosophers turned from large-scale synthesis to analysis of
Whereas Roger Bacon was an emand even pragmatic, thinker, Duns Scotus and William of Occam were subtle logicians who undertook to refine and correct Aquinas' theory of knowledge. But their thinking, like that of all their predecessors, was limited by the concept of orthodoxy. However rational and acute philosophical analysis might have become, it still had to operate within the strict limits set for it by transcendental truths, truths that were above reason and immime to analysis. The ultimate criterion for all knowledge and the ultimate sanction for all conduct was not the concurrence of human minds guided by the light of reason but the authority of a divinely inspired text and a divinely established institution. Given this ideal of orthodoxy, a major development in philosophy could hardly occur imtil Western men were prepared to break radically with the whole Christian world view. (Chapter 8.) relatively small-scale, "technical" problems.
pirically oriented,
INTRODUCTION
Perhaps the principal element of look.
What made
mentally alike was so sharply
this
world view was
its
sacramental out-
Augustine, Aquinas, and the other medieval thinkers so fundathis
outlook they shared.
from the medieval mind
is
that
What distinguishes the modem mind
modern men have
largely lost that out-
now share the basically secular point of view of the Greeks. To say that medieval men looked on this world as a sacrament means, first, that they con-
look and
ceived this world to be but the visible sign of an invisible reality, a world thoroughly impregnated with the energy, purpose, and love of its Creator, who dwells in it as He dwells in the bread and wine on the altar. Second, it means that medieval men conceived of this world as a sacrifice to be freely and gratefully dedicated to the all-good, all-true Giver. Thus, whereas for us (and for the Greeks) the world by and large means just what
it
seems to be, for
men
of the
meant something beyond itself and immeasurably better. Whereas for us (and for the Greeks) life on earth is its own end, for medieval men life's true end was beyond this world. It can hardly be denied that this sacramental point of view was a block to progress progress in knowledge of how to control the environment and utilize it for this-worldly purposes. To many it seems equally obvious, now that this viewpoint has disappeared, that men have rid themselves of much that was a Middle Ages
it
—
liability
modem
—ignorance, superstition, intolerance. What
is
not so obvious
is
that the
world has also lost something of value. If the sacramental outlook of the Middle Ages manifested itself here and there in what a modem clinician
would describe and confidence, that the
as acute
psychopathology,
it
also manifested itself in serenity
in a sense of purpose, meaningfulness,
modem
clinician looks for in vain
among
and
fulfillment
—qualities
his contemporaries.
XIX
Order these
my
loves,
Thou who
me!
lovest
JACOPONE DA TODI
Light Eternal,
who
in
thyself alone
Dwell'st and thyself know'st, and self-understood.
Self-understanding, smilest on thine own!
.
.
.
wheel whose circling nothing jars Already on my desire and will prevailed The Love that moves the sun and the other stars. Like to a
DANTE
CHAPTER
The
1
New
Religious
Orientation
Secularism was perhaps the most pervasive characteristic of the classical mind.
Man's leading problem, it held, is the achievement of well-being in this world. believed men have the intellectual and moral capacities to solve this problem and to fashion a good life for themselves by their own efiForts. The Middle Ages were, by contrast, a period during which philosophy was dominated by otherworldly interests. The problems not of this Hfe but of the next seemed of primary importance. Instead of a social, there was now a supernal ideal. Ethics and pohtics as the leading sciences gave way to the science of theology, which, for the Greeks, had been merely an appendix to physics. And science itself (conceived of as rational inquiry) declined in importance in an age in which man's natural powers were regarded as severely limited. The medieval mind, It
acutely conscious of it
now
hoped, put
its
its
supematvual good for which Being h^ld to be supremely good and
inability to achieve the
trust in
an
Infinite
THE
NEW
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
powerful and the creator of everything that
is.
Man's proper relation with
this
being became the primary concern of the Western world for some twelve centm"ies.
Though
this
profound change in orientation did not, of course, occur overMarcus Aurelius (121-180 a.d.) can be regarded as a turning
night, the thought of
The
point.
spirit of the future
was plainly
visible in his Meditations
and
in Stoic
doctrine generally, seen in such characteristics as otherworldliness, deprecation life and its transitory affairs, religious fervor, emphasis on duty, a sense and the notion of a universal society. Nevertheless, these ideas were still tempered by a basically classical outlook because of an insistence that man is a social, and a civic, being. During the course of the next century the emphasis markedly shifted not,
of this of
sin,
—
of coiirse, that classical attitudes disappeared altogether, but rather that the
newer
ideas
now tended
to dominate.
The Mystery Cults Among cults.
new spirit were the so-called mystery and representative.
the earliest manifestations of this
Of
these, three are important
THE GREAT MOTHER
The worship
Mother concerned the myth of the goddess Cybele. mourned, and death came upon the world. When Attis was brought back to life, the goddess rejoiced and natiu^e put on a garment of green. To rehearse the myth was doubtless at first simply a way to assure a good crop. Later, when it became a way for the worshipers to share in the immortality of Attis, the old vegetation rites were retained. In the spring of the year the adherents of the cult indulged in a period of mourning for the dead Attis. They fasted and flagellated themselves; more passionate WTien her
of the Great
lover, Attis, died, the goddess
devotees castrated themselves in a frenzy of excitement. These latter worshipers, exalted by their sacrifice,
Another
rite of the
became
priests of the cult.
Great Mother, which shows again
how
a very primitive
ceremony gradually evolved into a religion of redemption, was the "taurobolium." In Ais ceremony the initiate stood in a pit below a platform on which a bull was butchered. "Through the thousand crevices in the wood," wrote a fourthcentury observer, "the bloody dew runs down into the pit. The neophyte receives the falling drops on his head, clothes and body. He leans backward to have his cheeks, his ears, his lips and his nostrils wetted; he pours the liquid over his eyes, and does not even spare his palate, for he moistens his tongue with the blood and drinks it eagerly."^ Stemming from an ancient magical belief
THE MYSTERY CULTS
that a
man
whose body he partakes, which the initiate was purged of his sins. eternity" was a favorite motto of the worshipers of the Great
takes on the characteristics of the animal of
became a kind
this rite
"Reborn into
of baptism in
Mother.
AND
ISIS
OSIRIS
Like the myth of the Great Mother, the myth of
Isis
involved the death
and resm-rection of a god, Osiris, and guaranteed the salvation of the devout. As with Attis, the ritual simulated first the death of Osiris, then the lamentation of Isis, and finally the joy of Osiris' resurrection. This ritual was, however, more restrained than that of the Great Mother. It involved two daily services morning ceremony at which the priest drew aside the covering that during the night had veiled the statue of the goddess and an evening ceremony at which the statue was again concealed.
—
MITHRA Mithraism, too, was concerned with a savior god whose worship held the
promise of eternal life. But in Mithraism this now familiar redemptionist belief was connected with a complex theology whose central tenets were derived from a dualistic metaphysics. Mithraism held
it
impossible to explain the universe
Greek science on the whole had sought to do. According to Mithraism, two principles are at work in the world. One of these is responsible for all the good that occurs, the elements of order in the universe; the other, for all the evil and disorder. But instead of treating these principles as natural forces, Mithraism deified them as good and evil powers. The universe is merely the battleground on which these powers contend, and men, like loyal soldiers, should take their place on the side of the good product of a single principle,
as the
as
power.
But support of the cause of goodness
is handicapped by the soul's history. heaven every soul has traveled down toward the earth through the spheres of the seven planets. As it has passed through each sphere
From it
its
original
home
in
has acquired some of the disabilities that
mark
here on earth in the prison house of the body
—
is
this life of the flesh. Its
time
a testing ground for the soul.
—
If the soul does well if it is continent, loyal, and devout it will be reunited with god in that region of beauty and light whence it came. Otherwise, it will
suffer eternally in hell
with the demons
who
are the agents of the evil principle
in the universe.
In this scheme, Mithra was both judge and savior. trial at
weighed; he supported
and he promised the
The
He
presided over the
which, after a man's death, the merits and demerits of his soul were
rites of
his
worshipers in the never ending struggle against
evil,
faithful final victory.
Mithra elaborately symbolized
this theological doctrine. Full
NEW
THE
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
membership in the sect could only be won gradually. The prospective worshiper had to pass through seven stages, corresponding to the seven phases of the soul's descent to earth, by which he was gradually lifted from the impurity of his
former
life to the level of full communion. Admission to each new grade was preceded by ordeals that tested the soul's worthiness. Since Mithra was associated with the sun (for the sun, bringer of light, was also the god of purity and goodness, in contrast with the powers of evil, which
were
identified with darkness),
He was worshiped
many
of his rites
were
tied to events in the solar
—at dawn, noon,
and sunset; the seventh day of the week was especially sacred to him; and the greatest of all his festivals fell on December 25, the day of the sun's nativity, when he was reborn after
year.
thrice daily
the winter solstice.
RECEPTION OF THE CULTS AT ROME These mystery they were
officially
met with a varying reception in Rome. But generally opposed during Republican times and welcomed under the
cults
Empire. Thus, despite the fact that the Great Mother, introduced from Phrygia 205 B.C., when the Carthaginian War was going badly, was given credit for
in
the victories that soon followed, the Senate strictly limited her worship. In imperial days, however, Roman citizens were permitted to serve as her priests
and
to participate openly in her rites,
and imperial princes were included among
her devotees. Similarly, during the closing years of the Republic repeated attempts
made
to break
up the worship
of
Isis.
In 59, 58, 53, and 48
B.C.
were
orders were
Isis, and in 21 B.C. her worship was forbidden But such was the hold the cult already had on the populace that none of these measures not even a severe persecution ordered by the emperor
issued to destroy the altars of
in the city.
Tiberius in 19 a.d. first
to tolerate
— —was successful, and gradually the emperors themselves came
and eventually
The worship
to support the sect.
which originated in Persia, reached Rome about the middle of the first century b.c. For one hundred years or so it met with little success, and then suddenly, imder the Antonines, it swept over the West with astonishing rapidity. It was especially popular with the army, which carried it
of Mithra,
to every outpost of the
Why
Empire.
was there a marked change from opposition during the Republic to encouragement during the Empire? The answer to this question will throw a good deal of light upon the changes in the cultural milieu that occurred during the first three centuries a.d. changes that prepared the way for the coming of Christianity. Doubtless the early hostility to some extent simply reflected the conservatism of Roman officialdom. But as a matter of fact the beliefs and practices indeed the whole spirit of the cults and those of the traditional Roman religion were quite incompatible. The Roman religion was not especially
—
—
—
THE MYSTERY CULTS
Otherworldly, and there was certainly nothing redemptionist about
a formal, somewhat cold worship of local dieties regarded by the the protectors and supporters of the regime.
Its
it.
It
was
Romans
as
motivation was almost wholly
and civic. Thus, one of the most important functions of the Roman was to supervise the auguries by which the future could be foretold and
practical priests
the policies of the state determined.
By
the
first
century
B.C., it is true,
'
the upper classes
had largely
lost belief
in these gods. Julius Caesar, for instance, felt free to assert publicly in the Senate is not immortal and that death ends all. But whatever the leaders themselves believed or did not believe, they were assiduous in supporting the old religion as an important means of maintaining the discipline
the Epicurean view that the soul
and loyalty of the people. It was natural, therefore, for them to oppose cults whose adoption by the populace might disrupt the social and political cohesion of the Roman community. But the very characteristics of the sects that caused this antagonism were later on, in the Empire, the source both of their immense popularity with the masses and of the official approval that was eventually accorded them. It was in the third century a.d. that they all experienced an astonishing growth. What, then, was there about the third century that induced that growth? After the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 a.d., the Roman throne was occupied by a succession of weak and incompetent rulers. Every army set up its own "emperor," central authority virtually disappeared, and the barbarians breached the Rhenish and Danubian frontiers. In Gaul, only the major walled cities escaped pillage; in Greece, Athens, Corinth, and Sparta were sacked. A revived Persian monarchy threatened the Eastern provinces. For eighty years not a single emperor died peacefully, and in one fourteen-year period (235-249 A.D.) there were no less than seven emperors. At the end of the century another line of strong rulers appeared, but by this time the Empire had lost its vitality, the countryside had been laid waste, commerce had been disrupted, cities had been deserted. Only the strongest measures could halt the
ruin.
Therefore Diocletian,
who came
to the throne
in 284, radically altered the character of the Principate. All surviving traces
were abandoned, and the emperor became a despot, surrounded with all the ceremonial of an Oriental monarch. He was now called "Lord and Master," and his subjects, even those of highest rank, were obliged to prostrate themselves before him. These visible signs of absolutism were accompanied by corresponding constitutional changes. Local distinctions and privileges were wiped out, and a completely centralized bureaucracy was installed, so that there was a continuous chain of command from the emperor to the most insignificant official in the most obscure province of the Empire. Nor was the third century a wasteland politically and economically only. Literature and the arts experienced a corresponding decay. The mood of the of Republican forms
times was, naturally, despondent.
One
observer of the scene wrote.
THE
NEW
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
You must know that the world has grown its
former vigour.
It
bears witness to
its
own
old,
and does not remain in The rainfall and the
decline.
warmth are both diminishing; the metals are nearly exhausted; the husbandman is failing in the fields, the sailor on the seas, the soldier in the sun's
camp, honesty skill in
the
in the market, justice in the courts,
arts, discipline in
morals. This
is
concord in friendships,
the sentence passed
upon the
world, that everything which has a beginning should perish, that things which
have reached maturity should grow
and that
after
old, the strong weak, the great small, weakness and shrinkage should come dissolution.^
This sense of helplessness and defeat was produced, doubtless, not only by the pressure of external events
barian raids, and the civil
— the visible crumbling of the Empire, the bar—but also by the internal reorganization of the
strife
Empire effected at the end of the century. As government became more remote and more despotic, and as social and political organizations grew larger, men lost the sense of controlling their destinies. An edict issued by a faraway and inaccessible emperor might affect one's fortunes drastically, but one had no way of influencing it or even of understanding why it happened; one knew only that a great power was loose and operating in one's world. It
was natural that the
religions
by means
of
which the men
of this
new
era sought satisfaction were very different from those that had served the needs of the old Greeks
and Romans.
When men had
lived in a small city-state,
when
they had ruled themselves, their gods reflected the worshipers' sense of independence. But now, in a vast empire that all
that a despotic ruler could do,
was going
men foimd
to pieces before their eyes despite
comfort in belief in an omniscient,
omnipotent, and all-good deity, strong enough and wise enough to guide the
human
however exalted, could no longer control. So "Dominus" and worshiped as an absolute despot, became at once the model and the visible symbol of a still greater god who held the whole universe in his hand and whose commands were imperial edicts affairs that
personalities,
the new-style emperor, called
requiring instant obedience.
Neoplatonism Philosophy was naturally not
immune
to these changes in outlook.
The tone
appeared even more strongly in an important school of philosophy developed in the third century and known as Neoplatonism. Unlike Mithraism and the other cults, Neoplatonism was a philosophical theory; as such, it was concerned with epistemological and metaphysical of religiosity already evident in Stoicism
problems to which the cults were indifferent. For instance, the Neoplatonists were aware of the ambiguities in Plato's theory of forms; they made a genuine and at a far more sophisticated level, effort to deal with these difficulties
—
NEOPLATONISM
philosophically speaking, than had the Stoics. In the process of attempting to
which Platonism broke and to which Aristotle had provided at best only a partial answer, Neoplatonism developed a philosophy of religion that was to have a long career in Western solve the technical philosophical problems on
thought. Indeed, the Neoplatonic version of Platonism proved to be one of the
modes of Plato's continuing influence on philosophical thought. The two aspects of Platonism that chiefly appealed to the Neoplatonists were
chief
its is
tendency toward transcendence and perhaps too strong a term
—
its
its
antirationalism, or rather
insistence that
none of the
—since that
really important
be communicated by conceptual means. In both respects the Neoemphasized those passages in Plato's writing that suited their own biases and ignored those in which Plato himself had sought to correct his more extreme statements. Thus the Neoplatonic reworking of Platonism plainly truths can
platonists simply
showed the mood of the new age. As regards transcendence, Plato's insistence on the inferior status of the sense world and on the superior reality of the transcendent forms complemented the otherworldliness and world-weariness of the third centiu"y. The antirationalist side of Plato's thought had already been taken up in the last centuries of the old era by the so-called Academic sceptics, who had concentrated on those passages in which Plato had argued that physics can never be more than a "likely story." is a significant difference between the ways in which the Neoand the Academic sceptics reacted to this antirationalist strain of thought. The latter had been content to remain sceptical about metaphysics and to fall back for guidance in the affairs of daily life upon an essentially pragmatic attitude. Since we can never know the absolute truth about anything, we should, they held, operate on the basis of probability. This has a very modem sound. Today we like to think that we do not lust after certainty. If a theory or a line of action "works," that is, produces satisfactory results, most people do not worry about whether it is "true." This pragmatic attitude seems also to have satisfied the Academic sceptics. But by the third century the conditions of life had changed. Men now sought certainty through the mysteries of the
But there
platonists
—
Great Mother, through the worship of Isis, through the support of Mithra, through faith in Jesus of Nazareth.
The same overwhelming
desire for certainty affected
the Neoplatonists, and since, like the sceptics, they had abandoned the old Greek
conviction that truth can be reached by reason, they tried to find
it
by some
suprarational method.
The trend toward otherworldliness reinforced this desire to find a new and mode of knowledge. As the conditions of their life worsened, as men saw the world aroimd them collapsing, they natiu-ally turned away from it and
better
foimd solace in the vision of another and a better world
— perfect as
this
one
good as this is corrupt and evil. These two considerations have an obvious affinity: The better world, about which is
imperfect, beautiful as this
ordinary experience can
tell
is
ugly, wholly
us nothing whatever,
is
experienced in the irmer
8
THE
NEW
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
certainty of a suprarational vision.
Neoplatonism, then, was
how
The
central problem of philosophy for
how to reach that better world. Neoplatonism shared this orientation with the Eastern cults. Its interest, to achieve this vision,
was in man's relation, not to other men and to nature, but to the other world. Hence, whereas the dominant interest of classical philosophy as represented by Plato and Aristotle, and even by the Stoics, had been ethical, like theirs,
the dominant interest of the
the classical world
was
new philosophy was
religious. This signaled that
an end.
at
Plotinus Little
is
known about
(about 204-270
a.d.),
was seemed ashamed, his school. Plotinus
the origins of Neoplatonism or about the life of Plotinus the principal representative of the early period of the so completely uninterested in the things of this life (he
Porphyry wrote, of being "in the body" at all) from him little concerning his early years. It appears, however, that he grew up in Alexandria, one of those cities in which the West (as represented by Greco-Roman culture) and the East (as represented by the mystery cults and the new savior-religions) met and fused. Plotinus was disciple
that his friends could find out
obviously well trained in the classical schools. In an effort to learn
more about
have accompanied the army of the emperor Gordian on an expedition against the Persians. On his return Plotinus went to Rome, where his teachings soon became fashionable. Plotinus taught orally and seems to have written nothing until his fiftieth year, when he began to put down the lore of the East he
is
said to
the notes of his lectvires. After his death these were carefully edited by Porphyry, but they remain some of the most obscure of all philosophical writings, not only because of the maimer of their composition but even more because of their intrinsic difficulty.
PLOTINUS' VERSION OF PLATONISM It
has already been noted that Neoplatonism was a philosophy of religion
"of religion" because of
its
emphasis on getting into a right relation with a su-
prarational reality; "philosophy" because
on the
it
based
this
program, not
(as
with the
and legends of vegetation gods, but on a reinterpretation of Plato's metaphysics. One of the key passages for this reinterpretation was Plato's account of the Form of the Good. In the Republic, he likened it to the sun, which renders physical things visible and is at the same time the cause of their generation and growth. So the Form of the Good operates in the realm of forms: It "may be said to be not only the author of knowledge of all things known, but of their being and essence, and yet the good is not essence, but "'^ far exceeds essence in dignity and power. cults)
rituals
PLOTINUS
is beyond being was not carried any further by was followed immediately by the claim that reality is not beyond being, that we can attain a knowledge of the most real world, even of the Form of the Good, by dialectic that is, by logical and rational
This suggestion that reahty
Plato.
On
the contrary,
it
—
methods. This
and
its
without
is
an example of Plato's usual ambivalence toward the nature of reality world of ordinary experience. He held in suspension,
relation to the finally
as Aristotle
choosing between them, quite different points of view.
And
just
opted for the world of ordinary experience, Plotinus opted for the
on the hint given in the Republic and on similar suggestions Symposium, for instance), Plotinus developed the notion beyond being and beyond knowledge:
suprarational. Acting
in other dialogues (in the
of a reality that
is
The One, as transcending intellect, transcends knowing. The One is, in truth, beyond all statement; whatever you say would It;
alone of if
all
possible,
not
We
things has true being, has no name.
something concerning
It.
mean that we do not while we are silent as to what
that does not is
limit
the All-Transcending, transcending even the most august Mind, which
The All-Transcendent,
If
we do
seize It is.
at all.
It .
can but try to indicate,
not grasp
We
It
by knowledge,
can state what
It
.
.
utterly void of multiplicity,
is
unity's self, inde-
That from which all the rest take their degree of unity in their standing, near or far, towards It. It is the great Beginning and the Beginning must be a really Existent One, wholly and truly One. All life belongs to It, life brilliant and perfect. It is therefore more than self-sufficing. Author at once of Being and self-sufficiency. Only by a leap can we reach this One which is to be pure of all else, pendent of
all else.
.
halting sharp in fear of slipping ever so dual; for the
One
little
.
.
aside
and impinging on the
does not bear to be numbered with anything
else; It is
measure and not the measured. The First cannot be thought of as having definition and limit. It can be described only as transcending all things produced, transcending Being. To seek to throw a line about that illimitable Nature would be folly, and anyone thinking to do so cuts himself off from the most momentary approach to Its least vestige. As one wishing to contemplate the Intellectual Nature will lay aside all
may see what transcends the realm of one wishing to contemplate what transcends the Intellectual attains
representations of the senses and so sense, so
by putting away
all
that
is
of the intellect, taught
by the
intellect,
that the Transcendent exists, but never seeking to define
could only be "the Indefinable," for This
by any sound;
is
no doubt,
Its definition
It.
a Principle not to be conveyed
cannot be known on any hearing, but
if at all, by vision. no whence, no coming or going in place; It either appears (to us) or does not appear. We must not run after It, but we must fit ourselves for the vision and then wait tranquilly for it as the eye waits on the rising of the sun which in its own time appears above the horizon and gives itself to our sight. The Source, having no prior, cannot be contained by any other form of
We ought
It
not to question
whence
It
comes; there
is
.
.
.
1
THE
NEW
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
being;
orbed around
It is
nowhere
all;
possessing, but not possessed, holding
omnipresent; at the same time.
all. Itself
not present, not being circumscribed by anything; yet, as utterly unattached, not inhibited held.
It
from presence
at
God
is
is
any point.
present through
else there,
nor
all
of
God
all,
— not something
of
It is
God
here and something
gathered at some one spot; there
presence everywhere, nothing containing, nothing therefore fully held by Him.
.
.
is
left
an instantaneous void, everything
.
That awesome Prior, the Unity, is not a being, for so Its unity would be vested in something else; strictly no name is apt to It, but there is a certain rough fitness in desigriating It as Unity with the understanding that It is not the unity of some other thing such as point or monad. Nor tibility
on the contrary
that of extreme minuteness;
It
is
is Its
impar-
great beyond
anything, infinite not in measureless extension or numerable quantity but in
fathomless depths of power. It is wholly self-existent. Something there must be supremely adequate, autonomous, all-transcending, most utterly without need. All need is effort towards a first principle; the First, Principle to all, must be without need of anything.'^
These conclusions about the transcendence and the utter unity of ultimate from the inevitably conditioned character of
reality follow, Plotinus thought,
knowledge. Plato had of course held that most of our so-called knowledge (he
had termed by premises
"opinion" on
it
of
this
account)
is
conditioned.
which we are often quite unconscious.
It is
limited, that
"I shall vote for X,"
is,
we
conclude, after an investigation of the qualifications of the various candidates.
But
this
conclusion presupposes (what
that representative
government
provisional and hypothetical.
government
is
desirable,
But Plato had kind of thinking absolute truth.
what he
and
if
set beside this
We ...
it is
never have considered at
Hence our conclusion
is
all)
only
are in fact concluding, "If representative ,
and
if
...
then
,
I
ought to vote for X."
conditioned sort of thinking another and a better
(dialectic) that,
Now
we may
desirable.
is
being miconditioned,
is
capable of reaching
the case that Plotinus also talked about dialectic, and
said faintly echoes Plato's account in the Sophist
and the Parmenides.
Dialectic, according to Plotinus,
... is the method or discipline that brings with it the power of pronouncing upon the nature and relation of things what each is, to what kind it belongs and in what rank it stands in its kind, and whether its being is Real Being. Dialectic treats also of the good and the not-good, and of what is eternal and what is not eternal, and of these not by seeming knowledge but with authentic science. Finally it settles down in the Intellectual Cosmos and there plies its own peculiar Act; it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and falsity and pastures the Soul in the "Meadows of Tnith." It distinguishes the Forms and Authentic Existence and primary genera and follows in
—
thought their intercommunications, until tual
Realm and returned
it
has traversed the entire Intellec-
in analysis to the
first
principle.
Now
it
rests; at
PLOTINUS
peace while there, it is no longer busy about many things; it has arrived at Unity and it contemplates; it leaves to another science all that coil of premises and conclusions called the art of reasoning. The Divine Mind furnishes
its
standards, the most certain for any soul that
What
them.
else
and dividing,
is
until
necessary. Dialectic puts together for it
able to apply
is
itself,
has reached perfect Intellection. For
is
it
Wisdom. And being the noblest
combining the purest
endowmust needs deal with Authentic Existence, the highest there is; as Wisdom it deals with Being, as Intellection with what transcends Being.
perfection of Intellection and
ments,
of our
it
.
Dialectic
is
the most precious part of Philosophy.
bare rules and theories;
deals with verities.
it
It
.
.
does not consist of
It
knows the Truth, knows
above all the operation of the Soul. All that is submitted to it it attacks with the directness of sense-perception and it leaves petty precisions of .® process to what other sciences may care for such exercises. .
It is
.
not easy to extract any clear conception from this rhapsodical account.
But whatever Plotinus meant by dialectic,
it can at least be said that he thought from systematic, rational thought that "coil of premises and conclusions" that Plato seems to have held dialectic to be. For Plotinus, dialectic was a kind of mystic vision in which truth is grasped completely and all at once. Thus, though Plotinus may have adopted Plato's terminology, and though he certainly started from a Platonic thesis, his metaphysics is quite different from that of Plato. Whereas Plato held that there is a kind of rational thought that can reach an unconditioned truth, for Plotinus reality was unknowable by rational means. Paradoxically, Plotinus used rational arguments to support this antirationalist position. Ultimate reality, he argued, must not be limited in any way. Suppose that it is limited; then there is an other beyond it that does the limiting. Are it
—
radically different
the so-called real and this other in relation? Obviously they must be.
Then they
and the alleged real is not the whole, but a part. Hence ultimate reality can have no other. But if reality is unconditioned and if thought is conditioned, it seems to follow that reality is unknowable, at least by rationalistic thinking. Moreover, we carmot, according to this line of reasoning, attribute any specific properties, or attributes, to reality. For instance, many philosophers, including many Christian theologians, have held that we can attribute personality and volition to ultimate reality. But if Plotinus was correct, this is a mistake. For every person we know anything about is limited. My ego has meaning only as contrasted with other selves that I am not. But reality has no other and so are parts of a larger whole,
cannot be a it is
self in
any sense of the word that
we
can understand. Similarly,
impossible to attribute will, desire, or any other
real, since these
case an object
— even more
aimed
Having reached
obviously than thought
mode
of conation to the
— imply
an other, in
this
at.
this
we may seem to have reached the end. Yet many fine names to designate the unnamable
conclusion
Plotinus proceeded to use a great
1 1
1
2
THE NEW RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
and the unknowable. Thus he called it God, the First, the Good, the Absolute, the Infinite, even though he also insisted that no positive description of it is possible. How can this be? These epithets cannot be positive descriptions, that is, they cannot attribute any definite characteristics to the One, for any definite characteristic would limit it. Rational argument, it is clear, can tell us only what the One is not. This something, but not much. Suppose, for instance, that you do not know anything is at all about the author of the Enneads except that he is not Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Kant. It is tRie that you have a bit of knowledge about him, but it must be allowed that your knowledge is inadequate.^ PLOTINUS' MYSTICISM This limitation on reason and rational argument would not have distressed Plotinus himself because he
had
(or so he believed) a totally different and altocommunication with the real. In fact, his attack on rational thinking was part and parcel of his affirmation of an extrarational vision. He wanted reason to be incompetent, for its incompetence would emphasize the value and the significance of mystical experience. That Plotinus had a mystical experience and that it gave him an inner conviction of certainty about the nature and the meaning of the universe throws a great deal of light on why he held such-and-such metaphysical and epistemological views. But mystical experiences, however real and vivid they may be
gether better
way
to the person
of getting into
who
experiences them, are hardly a very satisfactory basis for
To begin with, such experiences are essentially private few people.^ Those who have not had this experience can hardly form any clear idea of what Neoplatonism is about. Suppose, for instance, that the experience of red were taken as fundamental and all-important and that a whole philosophy were constructed around this experience. Anyone suffering from red- green color blindness would be severely handicapped. Most of us, however, have experienced red, and though our difficulties with the "red" philosophy might still be serious, they would not be a philosophical theory.
and are limited
basic.
to a relatively
But with Neoplatonism, the situation
the basis of the theory
is
And
there
to Gretchen.
name Him?
1
is
another
When I
is itself
is
reversed:
The experience
that
exclusive.
which can be illustrated by Faust's reply believe in God?" he answers, "Who can Him! Feeling is everything. Name is sound
difficulty,
she asks,
"Do you
have no name for
Later in the Middle Ages John Scotus used this line of argument exphcitly to interpret the
Christian doctrine of divine transcendence. See pp. 174-80. 2 Plotinus claimed that this intuitive knowledge is "a power which that
"few use
times in
it."
According to Porphyry,
six years.
his biographer, Plotinus
all possess," but he admitted achieved the mystic state four
PLOTINUS
and smoke." This is an intelligible position for a poet to adopt; what the poet objects to, and asserts the inadequacy of, is not words as such but the precise, rigidly defined terminology of science.^ The poet himself uses words, but he uses words of a special kind, in a special way. His art is designed to capture and communicate the ineffable, to give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. This position may or may not be correct; it is at least consistent. The same thing, however, carmot be said for the philosophical mystic. He wants to give a theory about the universe as
a theory
is
it
is
revealed in his mystical experience; but
a rational account, and the experience
is
ineffable.
Hence
the
experience inevitably transcends the conceptual scheme that must be employed if it is
a theory that
is
being presented.^
THE NATURE OF REALITY So far the discussion has centered on the Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato's dictum that reality (the One, the Absolute, the First) is beyond being.^ But in the passage in question Plato also says that reality of
all
things
this hint,
known"
—
like the sun, the
maintained that the Absolute
universe, visible
and
invisible,
is
is
good
is
is
the "author of the being
a cause. So Plotinus, following
a power or force or energy. The whole
which overflows
a product of this activity,
to
create a succession of types of existence. These decrease in reality as their distance from their source increases, until at the extremity of the creative process
they disappear into bare nothingness, just as the light given off by some source of illumination gradually fades away into darkness. The first emanation, as Plotinus termed
it,
is
nous (variously translated as Spirit, Divine Mind, IntelliFrom nous emanates Soul, which contains in itself
gence, Intellectual Principle). particular souls, including
human
Soul in
its
turn creates, in accordance
with the archetypal Platonic forms, nature, that
is,
the
all
this
way
the whole universe
is
souls.
phenomenal world. In
the result of a succession of creative acts in which
each principle, beginning with the Absolute, produces the next lower principle, each lower principle being, insofar as its lower nature permits, the imitation of the higher. These doctrines
may be
illustrated
with a few passages from the
Enneads.
3
On
the subject of terminological precision, one of Plotinus' most sympathetic interpreters writes
that his "classifications
.
.
.
are not intended to be rigorous and exclusive. In his philosophy there
drawn across the field of experience. nonquantitative relations, which cannot be
are no hard boundary lines
throughout with
spiritual,
.
.
Neoplatonism deals
.
.
.
.
treated as logical
counters"— Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, Vol. I, pp. 122-23. 4 Plotinus occasionally seems to have recognized the ultimate frustration of his position. Thus, "the vision baffles telling. ... It is not to be told, not to be revealed to any that has not himself had the happiness to see" Enneads (Tumbull), VI, ix, 10-11. 5 See p.
8.
1
3
1
4
THE
NEW
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
The entire Intellectual Order may be figured as a kind One in repose at its summit as its King. We may think light before the light,
than Real-Being;
intellect, transcends
It
its
It is
It
proceed; these grow from Its
being
is
source,
is
yet not so remote from
is
the
It as
in It all that
is
power;
Its
way
.
is
It infinite in
the sense
does not change and will
Haxing no constituent
.
.
Supreme may be understood to be the cause at once of and of the knowing of reality. The sim. cause of the existence
and
of their being seen,
indirectly the cause of sight, without
is
being either the facultv or the object; similarly cause of Being and Di\"ine Mind, seen There and to their seer.
is
this Principle, the
a light appropriate to
what
is
Good, to be
Imagine a spring that has no source outside is exhausted by what they rest: the tides that proceed from it are at one
.
.
.
gives itself to all the rivers, yet never
itself; it
take, but remains quietly at
within
be
the
essential reality
of sense-things
It
unfailing finds duration.
parts It accepts no pattern, forms no shape.
In this
as to
It
power from which Life and Intelligence from the source of essence and existence.
not limited, nor. on the other hand,
and
fail,
as a
the primal Knower. But the One, as transcending
of magnitude: Its infinitude lies in
not
One
knowing.
the Good, for
is
of the
an eternal irradiation resting upon the Intellectual;
This, not identical with less
of light \\ith the
it
before they run their several ways.
.
.
.
none of the things of which It is the source: Its nature is that nothing can be affirmed of It not existence, not essence, not life It transcends all these. But possess yourself of It by the ver\- elimination of being, and you hold a marvel! Thrusting forward to This, attaining, and This Absolute
is
—
—
It more and more, imderstanding It knowing Its greatness by the beings that
resting in Its content, seek to grasp
bv
that intuitive thrust alone, but
follow upon
It and exist by Its power. The huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes .
.
.
at
and dwindles to darkness; this darkness, lying there beneath, the Soul sees and by seeing brings to shape; since it must go forth, it will generate a place for itself: at once body the extreme bourne of
last to
exists.
.
.
its
light
.
Side by side exist the Authentic All and universe.
.
.
.
^^'hat
we know
as
Nature
Soul of more powerful Ufe, and ...
it
is
its
counterpart, the visible
a soul, oflFspring of a yet earlier
possesses in
its
repose a vision within
which Nature broods is a sjjectacle bom of it by \irtue of its abiding in and with itself and being itself an object of contemplation. It is a \ision somewhat blurred, for there exists another, a clearer, of which Nature is the image; hence what Nature produces is weak; the weaker contemplation produces the weaker object. In the same way human beings, when weak on the side of contemplation, find in action their trace of vision and reason: their spiritual feebleness unfits
itself.
The
them
for
vision
\ision on
contemplation: they are hurried into action as their
which thev cannot attain bv
intellection.'
way
to the
PLOTINUS
These passages
on the To many, "emanation" is an almost meaningless word; "overflow" is a spatial phenomenon that is obviously inapplicable to an alleged nonspatial event; and the metaphor about light is, unfortunately, merely also illustrate the difficulty of constructing a theory
basis of a mystical experience.
a metaphor. Indeed, though Plotinus certainly seems to have attributed causal activity to his Absolute, as to attribute to
it
would seem
it
thought or
that to
will, for, like
do so
is
thought or
contradictory
just as
will, causality involves
an other, namely, the effect that the cause produces. Thus it is impossible to determine the relation supposed to exist between the Absolute and the world.
Do
Absolute and world face each other as cause and product? Or
somehow included
in its cause?
That
was Plotinus a
to say,
is
is
the world
dualist or a
pantheist? Passages supporting both interpretations can be found. Probably the
answer
is
that he
was both
— and neither.
This problem can be put another way: the Absolute's emanations?
Though
What
is
the ontological status of
Plotinus insisted that his Real
unity, the Real seems to separate into a variety of entities,
holds with respect to these subordinate
reals.
Thus, Soul,
an indivisible
is
and the same difficulty which is an emanation
of the Absolute, divides into various individual souls. If they are real. Soul's is lost; if unreal, are they mere appearance? And, if so, to whom? Plotinus avoided having to face these questions by identifying value with reahty. Now
imity
it
is
fairly
obvious that there are degrees of value (that
are better than others). Hence, that there are degrees of reality things.
And if there its
we have a way
When we want
we
that it
some things would seem
— that some things have more "being" than other to insist
emanations are not actually
to disappear altogether
is,
value and reality are identical,
are degrees of reality
about the Absolute's unity. ourselves that
if
real;
on
when
of escaping the its
unity
dilemma
we can remind
the emanations threaten
can hasten to assure ourselves
that, after all,
they
are partly real.
But
is
Plotinus' identification of value
and
reality acceptable?
Many
people
today are probably out of sympathy with the frame of mind that underlies this equation so much so that they will have difficulty even understanding what
—
means,
it. It is important, therefore, to remind ourselves have been many who have regarded this identification as a basic truth. Again and again philosophers have divided on this issue, and their differences reflect profound differences in Western culture. Accordingly, though we cannot at least not here resolve the issue, we can take these differences as a clue to the currents of thought and feeling that animate society.
it
let
alone accepting
that over the centuries there
—
—
One more puzzle may be mentioned
in connection with the notion of the
Absolute as a cause. This concerns the status of the phenomenal world and
is
a further complication of the general problem concerning the reality
and the otherness of the Absolute's emanations. What about the objects of the phenomenal world the earth, the stars, and the planets of ordinary experience? Are
—
they, like the various individual souls,
somehow emanations
of the Absolute,
1
5
1
6
NEW REUGrOUS
THE
ORIENTATION
or are they merely appearances for souls \\ith sense organs like ours? If the latter, of
what are
an imfriendly confused. itr
To
we cannot
If
this,
the\ appvearances? These
He
say
what reaht)
is.
is
to blame.
difiBculties
might cause
reaht^-beyond-being as hopelesslv
what
Plotinus could have rephed only that
of the terminolog>' that reaht)".
and similar
critic to reject the \ er\ idea of a
He had had
the good of talking about
is it
simply the inadequac\"
is
the e.xperienc-e of the ultimate
and in it all difficulties and contradictions are reconciled and harmonized what this reaht)" is, e\"en though he could not say what it is.
kneii
Let us therefore turn from Plotinus' accoimt of reaht\" to his description of
how THE
it
is
experienced.
WAY
OF ASCENT
According to Plotinus, the life of the universe is a double movement, first and then of return to, god. Man. of course, shares in this life: He is an exile who thirsts to return to god. his home. Plotinus gave no reason wby this double movement should occur, that is, no account of why god should of egress from,
create a universe only to reabsorb in the reasons for the
it.
Characteristically,
human predicament
he was
less interested
way back
than in mapping the
to
god-
Generally speaking, he held that there are two ways for man to reach god: One ma) be called the long way home; the other is shorter but vmfortunately, much less within man's power. Of the former httle need be said. Plotinus
accepted a doctrine of reincarnation like that of Plato and the Pythagoreans. man might be reborn in successiveh higher forms and
In a series of hves a
eventually pass altogether out of the c\ cle of birth and death. of hving virtuously, one gives oneself flesh,
up
to sensual gratification
Or and
if,
instead
lust of the
one will be reborn into lower and lower forms. In the immaterial in the
too
all
Heaven ever\ member
entering into varied forms, and,
when
it
may. a soul
realm of birth and dwell with the soul of aU.
Our
unchangeably
is
itself forever;
heavens of our universe, while the whole has life eternally and so the nobler and lordher components, the souls pass from body to body
souls
must have
.
.
N^ill
rise
outside the
.
their pro\inces according to their different p>owers;
and faculty Emancipated souls have tranfatahty of birth and all that belongs
released, each will inhabit a star consonant with the temp>erament
within constituting the principle of the
scended the spirit-nature and the entire to this \isible world.
.
.
life.
.
Those that have li\ed wholly to sense become animals; according to the f>articvilar temper of life, ferocious or gluttonous animals. Those who in their pleasures have not e\en lived by sensation, but have gone their way in a torpid grossness. become mere growing things, for this lethargy- is the entire act of the vegetative,
The
and such men have been busy betreeing themselves.
.
.
.
grade because during his life the active principle of his bein? took the tilt towards the brute bv force of affinits\ If, on the e\il-liver loses
PLOTINUS
contrary, the man is able to follow the leading of his higher spirit, he rises; he lives that spirit; that noblest part of himself to which he is being led becomes sovereign in his life; this made his own, he works for the next above until
he has attained the height.^
much
for the long way home. The short way home is the moment of which the mystic actually experiences union with god. There is little we can do to help ourselves here. The vision is simply something that happens to us, if we are fortunate. What, then, can we do to fit om-selves to receive the vision? Though Plotinus never treated this question formally, he did, in the course of the Enneads, suggest several different lines of preparation. For one thing, he advocated the contemplation of nature:
So
intuition in
Admiring this world of sense as we look upon its vastness and beauty and the order of its eternal march, thinking of the gods within it, the celestial spirits and all the life of animal and plant, let us mount to its Archetype, to the yet more authentic sphere: There we are to contemplate all things as
members
vested with — eternal their own —and presiding over these, pure Mind and unap-
of the Intellectual
perfect knowledge and
proachable Wisdom.
The contemplation
life
right,
in
**
Plotinus
had
in
mind was
not, of course, a busy, scientific,
or inquiring attitude, but a deep, quiet, and meditative mood: "So let the soul is not imworthy of the vision contemplate the Great Soul; freed from deceit and every witchery and collected into calm. Calmed be the body for it in that hour and the tumult of the flesh, ay, all that is about it calm; calm be the earth, the sea, the air, and let heaven itself be still. Then let it feel how into that silent heaven the Great Soul floweth in!"* Beauty in any form, Plotinus thought, is a road to the divine. A sense of beauty lifts us gradually from the enjoyment of beautiful objects to an appreciation of the in-dwelling form that is the source of the physical object's beauty, and, finally, to that which is the source of the form itself. Besides this outer way to the mystical vision, Plotinus believed there is an
that
inner path. After
all,
like nature,
each of us has "something of the divine" in
him. The divine's creatures are not only products of tions,
each in
way back
its
own way,
of
its
nature. This
is,
its
activity but also imita-
of course,
why we can
god through nature. Similarly, by shutting out everything by concentrating exclusively on our inmost self, we can find god. to
find our
external,
By what direct intuition, then, can It be brought within our grasp? The answer is that we can know It only in the degree of human faculty; we indicate It by virtue of what in ourselves is like It. For in us also there
6 [The insertion in the text of a series of questions and answers suggests that the Enneads were, in part at least, a record of Plotinus' conversations with his pupils author.]
1
7
1
8
NEW
THE
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
something of that Being. Wherever you be you have only to range over
is
which is capable of drawing from and you have your share in It; imagine a voice sounding over a waste of land; wherever you be in that great space you have but to listen. In order to know what Divine Mind is you must observe Soul and especially its most God-like phase. One certain way to this knowledge is to separate yourself from your body and very earnestly to put aside the system of sense with desires and impulses and every such futility, all setting definitely towards the mortal; what is left is the phase of Soul which we have declared to be an image of the Divine Intellect, retaining some light from that Sun, against this omnipresent Being that in you It
.
just as the region
about the sun ...
.
.
radiant with solar light. >
is
by
Plotinus expressed this thought elsewhere
instructing us to "purify" our
souls:
What (it is
is
meant by
pure)
when
no longer
it
Is it
it
purification of the Soul
sees images,
simply to allow
it
to
be alone;
much
less
them
elaborates
when
into veritable affections.
not a true purification to turn away towards the exact contrary of earthly
things? Separation too to lie at
its
mercy;
it
unperturbed through
is
the condition of a soul no longer entering the body
is
to stand as a light set in the midst of trouble but
all.
Purification
is
the awakening of the soul from the
baseless visions, the refusal to see them; its
is
keeps no company, entertains no alien thoughts;
its
separation consists in limiting
descent towards the lower, accepting no picture thence, in banning utterly
the things from which
it is separated, when, risen above the turbid exhalations and superabundance, though not free of the flesh, it has so reduced the body that it may be tranquilly carried.**
of sensuality
it is called, is the path many mystics have taken. WTiat from the standard type of Christian mystic is that for him there was no preliminary period of remorse and grief. Not all, certainly, but perhaps most Christian mystics seem to pass through what St. John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul" an overwhelming sense of sinfulness and helplessness. This, as we shall see, was true of Augustine. But Plotinus was never burdened in this way, for in his view evil was not real. He was, as Dean Inge says, "serene and cheerful, confident that the ultimate truth of the world is on
This via negativa, as
distinguishes Plotinus
—
his side"'
and that sooner or
In this
and
we
later
he would return
self-confident spirit of the classical world. But
other
men
it
is
only a trace. Like the
and a vale them he foimd perfect peace
of his time, Plotinus found this world a sea of troubles
of tears; like
them he sought
only in otherworldliness. free himself
and
dence survived blessedness.
to god.
can, perhaps, see a last faint trace of the old assured, poised,
"He labored
it;
and
like
strenuously," according to Porphyry, "to
above the bitter waves of this blood-drenched life." ConfiPlotinus only in his optimism about the possibility of achieving
rise
in
to leave
THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY
The Coming of Christianity So far some of the movements that were contemporary with the rise of Christibeen examined in order to understand the cHmate of opinion in which
anity have it
developed and which
is
reflected in
Though some of these vegetation myths, some the language
its
doctrine.
movements employed the language of old of crude Oriental dualisms, and some the technical language they
all
excellence that can be achieved only by the aid of It is
of Greek philosophy,
suprahuman some supernatural agency.
rejected the old humanistic-naturalistic ideal in favor of a
easy to see that in this respect they were but varying responses to the
and despair of the time of troubles that men were then experiencing. In the days of the Antonines, the Empire must have seemed a permanent solution to the problems created by the collapse of city-state culture. Thus disappointment was even greater when it became evident that the Empire was incapable of coping with economic crisis and barbarian invasion. The popularity of the mystery cults, which brought hope to the masses, reflected this widespread imeasiness. But the masses had doubtless always been ignorant and superstitious, frustration
ready to put their trust in occult powers.
The change
Neoplatonism
rise of
in
mood,
for this
is
therefore even
was a view
proletarian but to the upper-class intellectual. in Platonism
attitude
is
more
striking evidence of the
that appealed not to the
uneducated
The transformation
it
effected
a good index of the alteration that had occurred in men's basic
toward
life
and
its
problems. Instead of a natural, or at any rate an
we now find a beyond-being and a beyond-knowledge reality. The primary intellectual problem is not so much to understand this natural world as to grasp the reason why a transcendent and creative "One" should have chosen to produce it. The primary practical problem is to find a way of returning to that One from which we have sprung. Instead of the old view that the good life consists in self-culture through commimity living, there is now the belief intelligible, reality,
is evil, that man's good consists in release from it, and that this beyond man's own power. Because Neoplatonism was the outstanding contemporary philosophical theory, Christianity eventually had to take account of it. The earliest versions of Christianity were, it is true, like the mystery cults, directed largely toward the uneducated and illiterate. Later, when Christianity became socially respectable and aspired to a philosophical rationale, Neoplatonism proved both a model and a threat. Its bias toward transcendence, its asceticism, its deprecation of reason, and its emphasis on the centrality of mystical experience naturally held a strong appeal. But at the same time Christians had to steer clear of its pantheism and its denial of the reality of evil. But this is to anticipate. First the process by which a specifically Christian view of life gradually emerged must be sketched. In this undertaking the point
that this world is
1
9
20
THE
NEW
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
—
view followed elsewhere will be adopted that is, it will be assumed that was a part of the great shift in values that has been described and that it is in terms of this common cultural background that both its gradual emergence and its final triumph are to be understood. It has been relatively easy to adopt an objective, historical attitude toward the views thus far studied, for none of us, presumably, is a worshiper of Mithra or Osiris or the Great Mother. But many of us have been brought up in the Christian tradition, and for many centiu-ies the insights of Christianity have been held (by Christians) to be divinely inspired. It is especially important, therefore, to see that, like of
Christianity
all
other systems of belief, Christianity had a temporal and a cultural locus.
This locus was, of course, the crumbling Empire.
To its contemporaries Christianity was just another mystery cult, an obscure and inconsequential Jewish sect, far less significant, even in the third century, than many of the rivals it was shortly to supplant. The early Christians themselves did not imderstand the cultural relativity of their beliefs and practices. When they observed the parallels^ between their practices and beliefs and those of the other cults, they concluded that the latter were deliberate caricatures of the "true" religion. But from the perspective of two thousand years we can see that the times called for belief in a heavenly father, in a savior god, in
a promise of immortality, and in rites of purgation and renewal. today,
when most
It is
impossible
of the surviving descriptions of Mithraism are Christian in
how much Mithraism borrowed from and how much Christianity borrowed from Mithraism. That Christianity should have survived, whereas the other cults gradually disappeared, is not so much evidence of the objective truth or moral superiority of the Christian
origin
and
bitterly prejudiced, to say
Christianity
beliefs, as
it
is
testimony to the energy, the ingenuity, the polemical
and the administrative skill fathers. It
is
ability,
—not to mention the good luck — of the early Christian
also testimony to the fact that Christianity filled
an important social
need, and that, while holding out hopes for a happier future beyond the grave, it
was not unmindful of the need
for
improving the miserable present of the
urban masses. Christians are naturally disposed to attribute the triumph of Christianity to
divine plan, but they admit that divine causality flowed (in this case at least)
through natural channels whose operations can be traced and recorded. Hence there need be no dispute between Christians and historians of philosophy.
important point
The
by all these sects met a social need. And it is interesting to see how a change in the Western mind called forth these beliefs, and how these beliefs, in their turn, produced a new type of mind in the West. The real triumph of Christianity was not so much its defeat of paganism as the way it permanently marked the history of the West.
7
Some
is
that the beliefs offered
of these parallels
have been noted on pp. 3-4.
JESUS: THE JEWISH HERITAGE
Jesus: The Jewish Heritage PAGAN VIEW OF THE CHRISTIANS Jesus in
29
was born about 4
A.D.,
B.C.,
during the reign of Augustus.
the rehgion that bears his
name
spread, but
its
estimated that even in the fourth century, after its
He was
crucified
during the reign of Tiberius. For nearly three centuries after his death it
growth was slow.
had become the
It
has been
state religion,
adherents numbered not more than one-tenth of the population of the Empire.
This slow growth cannot be attributed to
official hostility.
For, though there
were persecutions, they were hardly on the scale that the early Christian fathers reported. As a matter of fact, for a long time after the death of Jesus, Christianity made little impression one way or another on the outside world, and it was not so much on religious as on political grounds that the Christians were suspect. Indeed, the attitude toward them that led to the "persecutions" by Diocletian and Decius cannot have been very different from the attitude of many Americans today toward the Communist Party in the United States that is, the Christians seemed a menace to the unity and solidarity of the state. Although they were few in number, they were a virtually independent group within the Empire, owing their allegiance not to the divine emperor but to their own God. Technically, therefore, they were traitors, and it is surprising that they were not treated much more severely. Moreover, very little was demanded of the Christians. The authorities were quite indifferent to what a man believed, as long as he conformed outwardly
—
to the rites of the state religion.
They could not understand,
the Christians refused to conform, and to
Roman
therefore,
why
officialdom the Christians
Even well-educated pagans concluded and "enemies and haters of the human race." They were generally regarded as madmen, hopelessly immersed in the blackest superstition. Thus Lucian, a second-century satirist, wrote with contempt that "these wretches persuade themselves that they are going to be altogether immortal, and to live for ever, wherefore they despise death, and many of their seemed ignorant
as well as dangerous.
that the Christians
were
atheists
own accord give themselves up to be slain."™ What were the actual beliefs of these Christians, who were hated by the few who knew something of them and ignored by the rest of the population? Jesus thought of himself as a to
Jew (which he was) and conceived
his mission
be to reform, not to destroy, the Jewish worship.* For these reasons, if we to understand Christianity, we must know something of its Jewish back-
want
ground.
8 Jesus preached in the synagogues (see Matt. 4:23), and after his death his disciples attended the ceremonies in the Temple (see Acts 3 1), worshiping as Jews and differing from their fellows only in their belief that Jesus was that Messiah whom the whole nation awaited. :
21
22
THE
NEW
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
YAHWEH Although in historic times the Jews were monotheists who called their god Yahweh, surviving traces in the Old Testament show that this monotheism evolved from soiu-ces in which there appeared fetish, tabu, totem, and other
Yahweh himself seems origibeen a war god, associated with clouds and other meteorological phenomena. It was perhaps Moses^ who, as he fused the several tribes into a single nation, made Yahweh the national god. At any rate, according to subcharacteristics of primitive religions everywhere.
nally to have
Yahweh chose
sequent traditions, like a
the Israelites to be his people, led them into
which he had selected
for their habitation, and watched over them very short-tempered father. Yahweh was conceived of as father both in
Palestine,
the sense of being the administrator of stern justice and in the sense of being the source of his children's life. But Yahweh was not merely a Jewish god. He was the father and creator of the whole imiverse, and, what is more, he had created it out of nothing. Why should such a great creator god trouble himself especially about one particular group? The Jews seem not to have asked themselves this question. A supreme national egoism made it easy for them to believe that this universal creator had chosen them above all other peoples. Despite Yahweh's concern for them, his people had a singularly unfortunate career. After the death of Solomon (922 B.C.) the Israelite kingdom split into two weaker monarchies, both of which had succumbed to foreign domination by the beginning of the sixth century B.C. As a result of the rise of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia, these Hebrew kingdoms, along with the Greek cities further north in Asia Minor, lost their independence. This
is
not surprising since
was quite insignificant, compared with the great empires of the East. Though from this time on, except for one brief interval, the Jews were ruled by a succession of foreigners, they never gave up hope of reviving their independence, and this intense nationalism deeply marked their religious the Jewish state
thinking. It
was inevitable
were
that the Jews, surrounded as they
in Palestine
by
ardent polytheists, should gradually adopt some of the beliefs of their culturally
more developed neighbors. This was probably under the suzerainty of Assyria, when of the conquerors
especially true after they
at least external
came
conformity to the worship
was prudent.
testimony to the extraordinary religiosity of the Jews that this weakening of their former single-minded devotion to Yahweh offered them a natural explanaIt is
tion of the otherwise incomprehensible misfortunes that
people:
Yahweh was
a jealous
god who had repeatedly
burdened
his
chosen
told the Jews to have
no other god before him. Isaiah actually maintained that the great Assyrian 9 Moses
thought to have hved in the thirteenth century b.c, but the earliest written "histories" much edited by still later hands, appear in the Old Testament) date from not earlier than the middle of the ninth century b.c. Hence it is quite impossible to distinguish the facts of his life from subsequent mythologizing and hero worship. is
of his career (which,
JESUS: THE JEWISH HERITAGE
empire was merely a
by Yahweh
tool used
to inflict merited
punishment on
the Jews.
O
my
Assyria, rod of
And
staff of
my
anger.
fury!
Against a godless nation
And
I
against the people of
send him. my wrath
I
charge him.
To despoil them, and to prey on them. And to trample them down like mire of the
streets.
But not so does he think.
And
not so does he plan;
For destruction
And
is
in his
mind.
to cut off nations not a few.
But when the Lord has finished
.
.
.
all his
work on Mount Zion and Jerusalem,
he will punish the arrogant boasting of the king of Assyria, and his vainglorious pride.
.
.
.
man that hews with it. man that plies it? sway the man that wields
Shall an ax boast over the
Or
a
saw lord
itself
over the
As though a rod were to Or a staff were to wield what
is
it.
not wood!°
The problem for the Jews was how to get back into Yahweh's good graces. The most obvious solution was to return to the traditional ritual that Yahweh had decreed for his people when they were still wandering in the desert. As a result the Jewish religion in these earliest days tended, like religions, to
emphasize an exact and pimctilious performance of
all its
primitive
god's
rites.
Only later did the Jews come to feel that Yahweh was less interested in the merely external performance of ceremonies than in the frame of mind of the worshiper what Yahweh demanded, it came to be said, was righteousness and purity of heart. Naturally, it was a long time before this insight emerged as a fully articulate doctrine. Its gradual development can be traced in the writings
—
of the various
One
Hebrew
of the ninth century
by
his
"prophets."
of the earliest of these prophets B.C.,
was
Elijah.
He lived in the middle who had been induced
during the reign of King Ahab,
foreign-bom wife, Jezebel, to worship idols and to commit all manner Yahweh whose worship Elijah sought
of other "abominations." It appears that the to defend against these
wicked foreign practices was
still,
in
many respects, Yahweh was
the old Mosaic god of wrath. Thus, in Elijah's view, what angered
Ahab's disobedience and frowardness. As soon as Ahab showed proper respect for his superior, Elijah's
Yahweh was
content.
Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying, "Have you seen how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he has humbled himself before me, I will not bring the evil in his days; in ° his son's days I will bring the evil upon his house."
23
24
THE
NEW
On
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
the other hand, the
Yahweh who spoke
to this visionary did not address
him, as he had addressed Moses, from cloud or thimder:
Now
behold, the Lord was passing by, and a great and mighty wind was
rending the mountain and shattering the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake, but the Lord
was not
in the earthquake. After the
not in the
and
fire,
after the fire the
soon as Elijah perceived
For the prophet Amos,
who
it,
earthquake a fire; but the Lord was sound of a gentle whisper. Now as
he wrapped
his face in his mantle.
.
.
.p
hundred years after Elijah, he was no longer a vain monarch, insisting on his prerogatives but capable of being won over by flattery. According to Amos, what angered Yahweh was not disobedience so much as luxury and vice.
Yahweh was
still
Woe
a
god
lived perhaps one
of wrath, but
them who are at ease in Zion, upon ivory couches. And stretch themselves out upon divans; to
Who And
.
.
.
lie
eat lambs from the flock.
The Hebrews were
to
.
.
.1
be punished
Because they have sold the innocent for silver. the needy in exchange for a pair of sandals; [Because] they trample upon the heads of the poor. And thrust aside the humble from the way.""
And
.
They were
to
.
.
be punished, that
is,
for injustice, not for ritualistic impurity.
Nor
could they hope to conciliate Yahweh by merely external acts of propitiation.
According to Amos, Yahweh declared: I
hate,
And
I
spurn your
feasts,
take no pleasure in your festal gatherings.
Even though you
offer
me
bumt-ofiPerings,
And your cereal-ofi^erings, I will not accept them; And the thank-offerings of your fatted beasts I will Take away from me the noise of your songs. And to the melody of your lyres I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters. And righteousness like a perennial stream.* Again and again during the eighth century note. Thus, for instance,
...
And
I
Yahweh explained
B.C.
not look upon.
prophets arose to sound
to Hosea:
delight in piety, not sacrifice;
in the
knowledge of God, rather than
burnt-offerings.'
this
JESUS: THE JEWISH HERITAGE
And
so,
Micah: shall I come before the Lord, And bow myself before God most high? Shall I come before him with bumt-ofiferings. With calves a year old?
With what
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams.
With myriads Shall
The
I
of streams of oil?
my first-born of my body for
give
fruit
for
my
transgression.
the sin of
my
soul?^°
You have been told, O man, what is good. And what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice, and to love kindness. And to walk humbly with your God."
These prophets of the eighth century conception of Yahweh.
And
came a long way from the earliest who attempted to combine the two
B.C.
later thinkers
Yahwehs faced the same problem that was to confront the Greek tragic poets the problem of harmonizing a set of primitive beliefs of the fifth centm-y B.C. with a later, more enlightened moral insight. The result, for the Hebrews as for the Greek poets, was a certain tension that was never wholly resolved; the old beliefs refused either to die out or to take on the new coloration. One of the Hebrews who attempted to eflFect this reconciliation was the author of the book of Deuteronomy. Writing toward the end of the seventh
—
century
he invented an ingenious formula for fusing together the old and the new inner, spiritual emphasis. The tradihe held, were important, but only as expressions of gratitude to
B.C.,
external, ritualistic emphasis
tional rites,
Yahweh for his loving-kindness. Thus, while of Deuteronomy recognized that the motive
on ceremony, the author was relevant. For the truly religious man, strict adherence to Yahweh's commands was not an external compulsion, for the worshiper who loved Yahweh gladly did what would please him, just as in an (ideal) human family the children obey their parents not because of fear but because of love experienced and returned. The Psalms are full of this sense of happy obedience: "Oh, how I love thy law," sang the Psalmist. "The law of thy mouth is worth more to me than thousands in gold and silver." And again, "I walk at large, because I have sought thy precepts," for the delight of the righteous man is "in the law of the Lord, and in his law does he study day and night. "^
1
[R.
H.
PfeifFer, in
insisting
of the worshiper
& Row, New York, 1941), p. 179, had not brought about desired results [that is, liberation from
Introduction to the Old Testament (Harper
notes that "Since ordinary sacrifices the Assyrian yoke],
many Judeans
.
.
.
revived the long obsolete sacrifice of the first-bom, be-
most precious thing on earth, its wrath would be allayed. Accordingly, the first-born of both sexes were sacrificially slain and cremated ... in a shrine called Tophet, just outside Jerusalem" author.] lieving that,
by giving
to the deity the
25
26
NEW
THE
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
With
the intention of updating and harmonizing
practices, the author of
Deuteronomy and other
all
and drew up a
existing traditions
priestly lawyers
systematic and inclusive code. This naturally covered a wide variety of
would now be
including what
called civil
and criminal procedures,
fields,
as well as
religious matters. ^^
became frozen into an unalterawas what may be called an was impossible to bring the Law
In the course of time this code unfortunately
body
ble
of law.
The
antilegalistic reaction.
up
to date,
strained
men
and
result,
For one
in the long run,
thing, since
became more and more
it
artificial interpretations.
it
difficult to
apply
it
without obviously
Again, constant harping on the
Law caused
back into the older ritualistic attitude, in which worship consisted in punctilious conformity. Impatience with this overemphasis on the Law and with the legal hair-splitting that accompanied it naturally reinforced the old sentiment, going back to the prophets, that insisted on the spirit, not the letter. to drift
JESUS' ATTITUDE
TOWARD THE LAW
This antilegalistic point of view was shared by Jesus. ^^ For example, Jesus
pointed out that literal-minded Jews and pedantic lawyers assumed the injunction about keeping the Sabbath holy to mean that men should not work on that day. When his disciples husked a handful of com to eat during a journey, the owners of the corn claimed that husking was "work" and so was wrong. Jesus
surmised, however, that their real motive was less a desire to protect the Sabbath against sacrilege than a desire to protect their property against trespass.
Or
again, though the
cautioned that
we
Law
said only,
"Thou
shalt not
commit
adultery," Jesus
should not assimie virtue to consist simply in abstaining from
woman. This misses the inner meaning of Yahweh's "Anyone who looks at a woman with desire has already com-
intercourse with a married prohibition, for
mitted adultery with her in his heart. "^ Similarly, though the Law said only, "Thou shalt not kill," Jesus held that one has already committed murder when
one
is
angry with one's brother in one's heart.
Jesus also
1
1
had great contempt
numerous petty regulations
that a rich
to plant seeds to how to treat slaves, from the pmiishment warning against pagan mourning customs, from a law of contracts to regulations
The code covered everything from how for rape to a
1
for the
governing the investiture of hostile cities. 2 Jesus' indictment of the current overemphasis on the Law was part of a widespread climate of opinion in Judea. The Essenes, for instance, a Jewish monastic sect, held that the only way to be
Law was by withdrawing altogether from the complexities of the "modem" world. Living simple and rigidly abstemious lives in the desert, they emphasized the virtues of piety,
faithful to the
justice, humility,
and
self-discipline. So, too, the
most famous rabbi of the time,
Hillel,
held that
the strict interpretation of the Law should be "tempered by kindness, gentleness and consideration of others. He taught, as Jesus did, in maxims given a paradoxical form in order to emphasize their message. Some of these maxims "My abasement is my exaltation"; "Judge not thy neigh-
—
"
bor until thou
"What
is
art in his place";
"He who wishes
hateful to thee do not to another"
to
make a name
for
himself loses his name";
— are strikingly similar to the teachings of Jesus.
JESUS: THE JEWISH HERITAGE
man
could easily obey but that imposed considerable hardship on the ordinary workingman: "To eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man," he said. In general, his position was that what matters is not so much what we actually do as the thoughts that issue from oiu- hearts.
And
the Pharisees and the scribes asked him,
down by our
observe the rules handed purifying their hands?"
"How
.
.
"Why do
your disciples not
ancestors, but eat food without
.
you are," he said to them, "in nullifying what God has Do commanded in order to observe what has been handed down to you. you not see that nothing that goes into a man from outside can pollute him? ... It is what comes out of a man that pollutes him. For it is from inside, from men's hearts, that designs of evil come; immorality, stealing, skillful
.
.
.
murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, abusiveness, arrogance, folly all these evils come from inside, and they pollute a man."''
—
Though Jesus sometimes carried this point of view to such an extreme that he seemed to say the overt act has no significance whatever, he was too good a Jew to reject the Law altogether. But he believed that Hebrew jurists were using the Law to "justify" unjustifiable conduct, that they were callous and inhumane, intent simply on the letter of the Law and deaf to the human motives and values involved. Therefore, as he said, he did not want to do away with the Law but to complete it to explain what it really meant. Since its real value was being frittered away in the multiplication of trivial rules, he tried to condense it into a few simple precepts. It is significant of his attitude that the two commandments that seemed to him to sum up a man's duty love thy God with all thy heart, and love thy neighbor as thyself were drawn from the Law itself, the one from Leviticus, the other from Deuteronomy.
—
—
—
FATHERHOOD OF GOD Another major point in Jesus' teaching was the fatherhood of God. "If you know enough to give your children what is good, how much more surely will your Father in heaven give what is good to those who ask him for it!"^ "In my Father's house," he said, "are many mansions," and his hope was that we should live so that we might be children of our Father who is in heaven. This emphasis on the filial relationship of man to God was not, of course, a discovery of Jesus'. It was central in many of the other Eastern cults popular in the Empire and doubtless contributed to their success. Also, long before Jesus' day the Jews had generally come to think of God as a father as they might think of a human father, though on an exalted scale, of course. That is, just as it was held that a human father had complete sovereignty over his children, so God was conceived to be absolutely powerful; and just as a human father hopefully tempered this power with loving-kindness, so God was the merciful .
.
.
—
27
28
THE
NEW
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
and providential Father of not
know
the
Hebrew
who
his children. Later on. Gentile Christians,
traditions
and who came across
time upon their conversion, naturally made
much
of
did
this doctrine for the first
But what
it.
is
important
about Jesus' notion of God the Father is not its novelty (or lack of it) but the fact that through Jesus it was transferred from the Hebrews to the West. For Jesus, God was by no means simply sweetness and light. The Hebrew
Yahweh was too deep-seated for Jesus not to have been touched by it. Like the prophets before him, Jesus was wroth with the "unfaithful and sinful age" in which he lived: tradition of a wrathful
Then he began to reproach the towns been done, because they did not repent.
in
which most
of his
wonders had
"Alas for you, Chorazin! Alas for you, Bethsaida! And you, Capernaum! Are you to be exalted to the skies? You will go down among the dead! For if the wonders that have been done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have stood until today. ^^ But I tell you that the land of Sodom will fare better on the Day of Judgment than you will!"^ .
JESUS' BELIEF
IN
.
.
IMMINENT JUDGMENT DAY
Moreover, Jesus was dominated by a conviction that the end of the world was, indeed, so imminent that he believed "some of them that stand
was near
—
coming." "Repent ye, for the Kingdom of
here will see
its
was therefore
his reiterated thesis.
in
He
God
is
at
hand"
thought the generation about him lived
wickedness and corruption, hovering on the brink of a chasm, careless of
the fate in store for
it.
It
behooved him,
therefore, like the prophets of old,
to urge his fellows to repent, to prepare themselves for the
day of judgment.
In comparison with the urgency and immediacy of this need, nothing else seemed
him of consequence. For this reason the moral teachings of Jesus have sometimes been interpreted as "interim morality." The extremes to which he urged his contemporaries seem most comprehensible in terms of his sense of crisis and his expectation that the world was about to end and tfiat a wrathful to
Father would soon judge his erring children. Since the world was soon to end,
common
was, from his point of view, the sheerest
it
sense to urge his fellows to give
Under such circumstances, what could the other cheek." In similar fashion saying, "Let the
dead bury
it
away
all
their
goods to feed the poor.
matter that another strike one?
we must understand Jesus' otherwise harsh He cannot have been urging the neglect
their dead."
of ordinary duties of this kind;^^ he
must simply have been expressing
dramatic fashion his conviction of the imminence of the end for us living
1 1
— "Turn
all,
in a
both
and dead.
3 [Sodom had long ago been destroyed by Yahweh because of its wickedness aitiiob.] literally, this dictum conflicts, for instance, with the commandment, "Honor thy father and mother," on which Jesus insisted (Matt. 19:19).
4 Taken
JESUS: THE JEWISH HERITAGE
THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS So
some
far
of Jesus' leading ideas
for a formal ethical theory
have been mentioned, but
— even a doctrine of virtues— in
if
we
look
Jesus' teachings,
we
be disappointed. There is certainly nothing in the gospels like Aristotle's Ethics, nothing even like Cicero's De Officiis. Jesus' teachings were not systematic; he taught in paradoxes and by means of parable and example. Nevertheless, shall
because
all
West have been
the ethical theories subsequently developed in the
deeply marked by his views,
it
is
necessary to try to summarize them.
To begin with, then, what about "pleasure"? To fix the place and the role had been one of the primary concerns of all the classical moralists. Though Jesus did not take up this question specifically, it is clear that he was totally uninterested not only in what may be called "sensual" pleasures but also
of pleasure
in the cultivation of the talents, that
is,
those "higher" esthetic satisfactions that
loomed so large in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. In this respect, Jesus' view was like that of the Greek Cynics, but the background of thought that led him to this conclusion was quite different. Thus Jesus himself did not insist on that absolute chastity some of his followers were to take as their ideal, and he was so convivial a comrade that his enemies called him a glutton and a winebibber and criticized him for liking "low" company too well. Yet, though Jesus was not himself an ascetic, his sense of the imminence of the Kingdom led him habitually to ignore everything but righteousness. Hence it was possible, later on, for ascetic-minded Christians to find authority for their views in his teachings. As a result Christianity developed a markedly ascetic bias.
was simple: In the first place, we need take no thought be no morrow; in the second place, the more we concern ourselves with property and possessions, the more likely we are Jesus'
for the
own
position
morrow,
for there will
to neglect readying ourselves for the last judgment:
Do not store up your riches on earth, where moths and rust destroy them, and where thieves break in and steal them, but store up your riches in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy them, and where thieves cannot break in and steal them. For wherever your treasure is, your heart will be also. For what good Whoever wants to preserve his own life will lose it. does it do a man to gain the whole world and yet part with his life?'^ .
.
.
.
.
.
—
partly because Similarly, Jesus was inclined to be critical of the wealthy he believed, as do the poor in every generation, that they got their riches imjustly, and partly because, having possessions, they were naturally inclined to "take thought for them." From Jesus' point of view the poor had a great advantage,
the rich a great disadvantage, in preparing themselves for the day of judgment. ^^
1
5 This
God
what Jesus meant when he said that it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle (Matt. 19:24).
is
29
30
THE NEW RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
Later,
when
Christianity
came
into contact with the impoverished populations
of the Empire, this attitude lent
when one had
tremendous
it
chances for immortality and eternal
Beyond can a
man
sales value. It
was
reassuring,
nothing, to be told that the less one had, the better were one's bliss.
away the things of this world, what Kingdom of God and His righteousness"?
negative injunction to put
this
do, positively, to "seek the
—
answer was that we should obey the Law not just its letter, of course, And this means, as can be inferred from nimierous scattered sayings of Jesus, cultivating a certain disposition, or frame of mind. This disposition includes humility ("The son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister" "I am among you as he that serveth" "J^^g^ ^^^ ^^^ Y^ be not judged"); forgiveness ("Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good Jesus'
but
its spirit.
—
to
them
—
that hate you,
and pray
for
them which
despitefully use
you and
persecute you"); charity ("Love thy neighbor as thyself"); faith ("Have faith in God. What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive .
.
.
them, and ye
shall
have them"); and acceptance ("Thy
will
be done").
JESUS' ETHICS COMPARED WITH GREEK ETHICS
The most
striking thing about this
ethical thought,
statement
list
of virtues, as
compared with Greek
the absence of any social ethic. Almost the only political
is
made by Jesus was in reply to the question, "Is it lawful to pay tribute By this inquiry his enemies hoped to present him with an embar-
to Caesar?"
he denied that it was right to pay tribute, he would go on record as a rebel against his country's overlords; if he answered affirmatively, he would antagonize all those who hoped for independence and, in addition, would seem to put pagan law above the law of Yahweh. The question was, therefore, an example of the legal hair-splitting Jesus detested, and his answer rassing dilemma. If
to
it
— "Render
that are God's"
to
Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation, which subse-
— was a
quent generations have interpreted to it is
suit their various
only a negative injunction, and, taken by
itself, it
requirements. At best
cannot serve as the basis
for a political or social system.
There are several reasons for this omission in Jesus' teachings. In the first was prominent in Greek thought because the Greeks held man to be a social animal whose good could be attained only in communal give-and-take with his fellows, and it therefore seemed essential to solve the problems of communal living. But, whereas the Greeks had been concerned with working out man's destiny in this world, Jesus was otherworldly: God's Kingdom, he held, was so imminent that it was profitless to worry about techniques of government. In the second place, because of his emphasis on "inwardness," his concentration on motivation, Jesus was uninterested in overt behavior or in the social and political devices used to control it. And, finally, the fact that Jesus place, social philosophy
JESUS: THE JEWISH HERITAGE
was a member of a subject race ruled by foreigners meant that politics could him that it had had for the free elite of a Greek city-state. As long as the Christians were a minority group living in, but not an organic part of, the Roman Empire, as long as they momentarily expected the last not have had the same primacy for
judgment, they could afford to follow Jesus in his neglect of on,
when
receded into the distant
was obliged
to
But later
assume responsibility for a crumbling empire, the Christians found
necessary to study politics.
it
politics.
hope faded, when the coming of the Kingdom future, and when Christianity, now the state religion,
the eschatological
And
later generations of Christian thinkers,
who
had to construct political and social systems on the basis they had inherited from Jesus, faced a difficult problem. This concern with politics was, as we shall see, but one of the changes forced on Christianity by its emergence as a world religion.
But lack of a political or social interest is not the only, or even the chief, between Jesus' point of view and that of Greek ethical theorists. There
difference is
nothing in Jesus'
virtues"
— science,
list
art,
of virtues that corresponds to Aristotle's "intellectual
philosophic wisdom, and so on.
One
reason for
this,
was Jesus' sense of crisis, which left no time for scholarship; another may have been that, coming from "plain people," he had not experienced the doubtless,
delights of scholarship.^^
When we
turn to Aristotle's moral, or practical, virtues,
—
we
enter an area
which Jesus was vitally interested but even here his point of view was quite different from that of Aristotle. Jesus himself had nothing, for instance, to say in
about courage, an important Aristotelian virtue. And later Christians who reintroduced it as a virtue interpreted it narrowly as the heroism of the martyr
prepared to die for
who
his faith
— a courage very different from that of Aristotle's
it would be disgraceful to flee. Again, whereas was the crown of the virtues, for Jesus it was a grievous and meekness, humility, and willing acceptance of Yahweh's commands were
citizen
faced death because
for Aristotle pride sin,
virtues.
The
difference in point of
view
is
enormous. For Aristotle the good
consisted in realizing the full potentialities of
human
nature.
To the
life
questions,
be courageous? Why be just?" Aristotle in effect answered, "Because courage and justice are aspects of human nature rightly understood (the ideal, that is, that reason discovers; not necessarily the actual), and the coward or
"Why
the unjust man,
who
possibly be happy."
is
thus denying one of his essential functions as man, cannot
And
as for pride, Aristotle held that since
it is
thing to be a man, it would be ridiculous not to act the part. But Jesus began with God, not with man. For him the good
1
6 This
is
a very fine
life
consisted
possibly one point that distinguished Jesus from his older contemporary, Hillel (see
p. 26, n. 12). Hillel, like Aristotle,
was a learned man.
31
32
NEW
THE
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
God, not in developing to its full the form "man." This is why Jesus was such a grievous sin to be proud was to be self-centered when one ought to be God-centered. Thus the fact that Jesus concentrated his attention on God meant that his ethics had a completely different sanction for moral living. It might be barely possible, by stretching the meaning of words, to say that what Jesus wanted was happiness, but for him happiness consisted in obeying a stem but loving in pleasing
—
that pride
felt
up
Father, not in living
the
word "happiness"
manhood. But it is better not to use connection with Jesus' ethics. The word suggests
to one's ideal of
at all in
is the reward that an omnipotent Father bestows compliant children. This indeed is the sense in which some of his disciples understood Jesus, but the reward Jesus himself envisaged was the sense of having
that the Christian sanction
on
his
conformed to God's will. God's approving, "Well done, thou good and faithful was the best reward he could conceive of. This contrasts sharply with
servant,"
Aristotle's sense of self-congratulation; nothing in his Jesus'
"Thy
will
Another difference created by the primacy of God compared with Aristotle's egoism. According
altruism, as
sanction for socially oriented conduct of friendship
is
thought corresponds to
be done."
is
the agent's
in Jesus'
thought
is
his
to Aristotle the ultimate
own happiness.
His treatment
a case in point. Aristotle advised us to cooperate with our
him and, what is more, to do so, not merely and enjoyment, but because we are all children of the same Father. This sense of the common fatherhood of God led Jesus to emphasize
neighbor; Jesus urged us to love for
mutual
profit
the essential equality of
all
men
— or rather, of
all
Jews, for there
is little
evidence
that Jesus thought of teaching or having a message for any but his fellow
Jews.^^
would not have understood this point of view. The ideal Greek moralists was exceptionally rich the full and all-round development of a complete personality. But they thought this possible only for a small elite, even among Greeks. The basic moral problem for them was therefore a problem of selection: how, out of the mass of humanity, to find those capable Plato and Aristotle
—
of the
of this kind of development.
In comparison with the Greek ideal, Jesus' view was, qualitatively speaking, narrow and limited but it had two great advantages: It was genuinely altruistic and outgoing, and it was truly democratic. The good it envisaged was equally open to all. Once the violent reaction against paganism subsided, even the Christians realized there was much of value in Greek ethics. Accordingly, the problem became how to combine the Greek insight into quality with the Christian emphasis on equality how to create opportunity for all, rather than
—
how
1
—
to select the fortunate few.
7 There
is
thus in Jesus' teaching a provincialism parallel to that which caused Plato and Aristotle
to distinguish sharply
between Greeks and barbarians.
JESUS: THE JEWISH HERITAGE
THE MESSIAHSHIP OF JESUS So far discussion has centered on Jesus' conception of God and of the relation in which men ought to stand to Him. But what did Jesus conceive to be his own relation to God? It is easy to say that he thought himself the Messiah sent to
announce the coming of the Kingdom. But
understand
this mission?
This
is
in
what
sense, exactly, did Jesus
a question of great difficulty that
we
cannot hope
not especially relevant to a purely philosophical
and that, happily, is from the point of view of historians, the opinions of Jesus' contemporaries are more important than those of Jesus himself. It is not what Jesus meant but what they thought he meant that had an impact on the course to settle here
discussion. In fact,
of events. Jesus repeatedly preached the
imminent coming of the Kingdom, but
so did
another Jew of that day, and not everyone understood this vague expression
many
had for Jesus, Longing for the ordinary man independence from foreign rule, he took the promised Kingdom to be a revival of an autonomous Hebrew monarchy. From this point of view the Messiah was a second Moses, a military leader who would throw out the Romans and establish peace, freedom, and prosperity. For the Romans themselves this Messianic hope natiu-ally created a serious political problem, especially since there was a vigorous underground party the Zealots agitating for rebelUon who were only too happy to make political use of this naive belief about the coming of the Messiah. It is against this background that we must understand the events leading up to Jesus' death. As long as Jesus and the prophet John the Baptist (who had designated him as the Messiah) remained in the desert and confined themselves in the
same way. Whatever moral and eschatological meaning in the street
understood
it
it
in a political sense.
—
—
Roman authorities could afford to overlook the matter. But when down came to the urban centers and tried to inflame the mob, it was
to talk, the
they
obviously a serious business. First, John was eliminated
— conveniently, by one
who had been antagonized by his violent language when Jesus entered Jerusalem in accordance with insults. Then, and gratuitous tradition foretelling the coming of the Messiah, and when the people ancient an
of the
Romans'
local
puppets
received him as such, he was arrested quietly at night and despatched so promptly that no one outside his immediate circle knew what was happening. It was not necessary to deal with any but the ringleader, for his disciples fled with ignomini-
ous haste.
The Jewish position of to.
Why,
leaders
modem
who
quislings.
operated under the
Roman
They could not protect
officials
Jesus,
indeed, should they have sympathized with this
were
in the
nor did they wish
"madman" from
the
provinces? Even those who may have secretly shared Jesus' supposed goal of independence knew the time was not ripe; they can only have regarded Jesus as an unmitigated nuisance who stirred up trouble to no avail. Hence one can hardly blame them or hold them responsible for Jesus' death. Certainly Jesus did not, for he had known what was going to happen to him.
33
34
NEW
THE
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
Why,
then, did Jesus deUberately choose to die? This
puzzles Jesus' disciples had to face after his death.
The
is
one of the many
solution they
worked
out was largely determined by their understanding of his Messiahship, just as their understanding of his Messiahship was deeply marked by the events on the
The impression Jesus made on the Romans and on the Jews at been noted. But the opinion Jesus' own disciples formed of his Messiahship remains to be seen. If the impression made on the Romans and Jews decided of Calvary.
hill
large has
the tragic
outcome of
Jesus' expedition to Jerusalem, the impression
made on
the disciples decided the future of the Church.
The Jesus Movement It is
life is
anachronistic, of course, to talk about "Christianity" as existing during Jesus'
— or even for many years after
his death.
the gradual development of Christianity
complicated dogmas
— out
What must now be
— a body
traced, indeed,
of theological beliefs
and
of the simple teachings of Jesus, Judaism, Oriental
mystery cultism, and late Greek philosophy. These miscellaneous beliefs had to be harmonized and organized into one body of doctrine. Doctrine itself had to be accommodated to the administrative needs of a growing institution. Neither of these closely associated enterprises was in any sense plarmed. Doctrines and
—
institutions grew the work of many hands; and as they grew they created problems with which future generations had to contend.
HOW
THE MOVEMENT SURVIVED
Let us begin by asking
managed
how
the
little
movement
that Jesus
had
started
That the crucifixion caused a crisis that might well have destroyed it at its birth is surely obvious. For, whatever Jesus' own view of his role in the coming Kingdom, there is little doubt that his disciples interpreted his Messiahship literally and believed, up to the final catastrophe on the hill of to survive.
Calvary, that Jesus was to reign as an earthly monarch, with themselves as his chief advisers. ^^ His execution was, therefore, a tremendous shock. surprising that the disciples scattered
necessary to take measures against them. in the
What
is
surprising
is
is
not
feel
it
that their belief
It revived because they became convinced appeared to them and talked with them. This restored
Messiahship of Jesus revived.
that after his death Jesus
their belief that Jesus was, after faith in the
1
It
and that the authorities did not
coming
of the
all,
a supernatural being.
Kingdom. And, indeed,
as they
It also
restored their
looked back on Jesus'
8 Because the disciples expected a great future for themselves, a certain amount of rivalry developed among them: Who was to sit on King Jesus' right hand? Who on his left? (Mark 10:37 ff.)
THE JESUS MOVEMENT
life, it was not the purity or nobility of his ethical insights but his miraculous powers that chiefly impressed them. In this way the disciples found the confidence to resume preaching the coming of the Kingdom. What exactly this Kingdom meant to them is difficult, indeed impossible, to determine. But until the Messiah's return brought the Kingdom, they made their lot more bearable by organizing a communal life of mutual
self-help. In the early days,
we
are told, "the believers
all
shared everything they
and belongings, and divided the money with all the rest, according to their special needs."^ It seems likely that the earUest Christian congregations performed for their members many of the
had with one another, and
sold their property
—
modern trade union or fraternal organization providing medical widows and orphans. ^^ Whereas some were content to define reUgion largely in economic terms,
functions of a
care, suitable burial, relief for
others emphasized a spiritual and otherworldly element. In this cormection the contrast
between the two versions
"Blessed are you those fact.
who And
who
of the Beatitudes
is
significant.
Luke's simple
are poor" becomes, in Matthew's version, "Blessed are
feel their spiritual need," that is, the poor in spirit, not the poor in Luke's assurance that the hungry will be fed becomes Matthew's
who hunger and
be satisfied. and give away the money!" is softened in Matthew with a significant qualification: "If you want to be perfect, "^ go! Sell your property and give the money to the poor It is hard not to see in these emendations a recognition that the coming of the Kingdom had been postponed and that believers therefore needed to find a modus vivendi for life in this world. It seems also that the disciples were now assurance that those
Similarly, Luke's drastic "Sell
thirst after righteousness will
what belongs
to you,
.
.
.
reaching beyond the poor and downtrodden to a well-to-do class, to which health and burial insurance would not have had strong appeal.
SHIFT OF EMPHASIS TO JESUS In other words, as time passed and the movement spread, the emphasis of the Christian "message" shifted to the promise of immortality; and with the change in the message there was a change in the conception of its author. Jesus
was becoming the central figure of a new religion. In Jesus' own mind the focus of attention had been Yahweh, father and creator. For the disciples, increasingly, it became Jesus himself. And whereas Jesus had taught that salvation lay in cheerful obedience to Yahweh's law, the disciples taught that it lay in accepting their belief that Jesus was indeed the long-awaited Messiah. But if Jesus was divine, what was his relation to the Father? Originally the disciples had thought of Jesus simply as "anointed by God," that is, designated by Yahweh to perform a certain mission, just as in the past Amos and Elijah 1
9
"A
religious observance ...
one's self unstained
is this:
to look after orphans
by the world" (James
1:27).
and widows
in their trouble,
and keep
35
36
THE
NEW
RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION
and Isaiah and David and other of Yahweh's children had been designated by him. But with the increasing concentration on the divinity of Jesus, this could
no longer
suffice.
Various formulas were put forward that were the source of
bitter quarrel in the
growing Church and that have survived to
this
day
to divide
the Christian community.
The divinity of Jesus created further difficulties. Why had the coming of the Kingdom (whatever this was conceived to mean) been postponed? Why had the divine Jesus allowed himself to be killed by the Romans? As regards the first question, the disciples decided that the time
was not yet
ripe, that the
Jews were
too wicked and that their refusal to accept Jesus' teaching and his crucifixion
were signs of this. Accordingly, since the disciples wanted to hasten Jesus' return and the fulfillment of his mission, they saw their duty clearly: They could best hasten the coming of the Kingdom by bringing their fellow Jews to see the light. As for the second question, they recalled that Jesus had said he came to give his life as a ransom for many.^^ It must somehow be that his suffering on the cross was designed to help pay for these sins of the Jews. Unfortunately, these answers created still more puzzles. To whom was the ransom paid? To the devil? But this seemed to imply a rival to Yahweh's power, who had to be bought off. And could not the creator God, the loving Father, have found a less terrible way of redeeming His erring children? If these were desperate puzzles for the disciples, they presented even greater difficulties for the fellow Jews to whom the disciples preached the new gospel. To these determined monotheists, any suggestion of the divinity of Jesus (whom they recalled as a plain man, the son of a carpenter, who died as a common criminal) must have seemed blasphemous. Thus, though the opposition to Jesus himself had been largely political in origin, the antagonism to his disciples had a religious animus.
Though the
disciples originally thought of themselves as Jews,
with a mission to preach to Jews, the increasing antagonism they experienced caused them to turn their attention toward others. ^^ As has been seen, conditions in the
Empire were such
promised immortality to
as to assure a
his worshipers.
stances that favored a savior
ready reception for a savior god who Moreover, there were special circum-
god with a Jewish background.
THE JEWS OF THE DISPERSION As
it
happened, only a small fraction of the Jewish population lived in The great majority of the Jews, called the Diaspora (Dispersion)
Palestine. 22
20 Of course,
the saying (Mark 10 45) :
may be
a later attribution to justify the beUef, but the annual
scapegoat that was supposed to absorb the sins of the people was an ancient part of the Jewish religion (Lev. 16:8 ff.) and similar rites have appeared in many primitive religions.
sacrifice of a
21 The
final
break occurred
in
movement while remaining
70
a.d.
when
faithhil to
the Christian Jews (as those who adhered to the Jesus Law may be called for convenience) re-
Judaism and the
fused to join the rest of the Jewish nation in a rebellion. 2 2 According to one estimate there were 4,500,000 Jews in the Empire (7 per cent of the population), of whom not more than 70,000 lived in Palestine.
THE JESUS MOVEMENT
because they were scattered through the Empire, were perhaps less severely orthodox than the Jews of Palestine. Living in Alexandria, in Rome, in Antioch, with pagans and with same time, the worship of Yahweh had a certain appeal for the Jews' neighbors, and throughout the Empire considerable numbers were converted. It appears that these converts were not
and
in other imperial cities, they
were
in frequent contact
the liberalizing influences of Greek thought. At the
always required to follow the circumcision.^^ In this
way
Law
there
in all its rigor,
came
to
be a
population that can fairly be described as a disciples:
men and women
familiar with,
of view of Judaism but not
nor to submit to the
fairly large
rite of
segment of the imperial
fertile field for the ministry of the
and sympathetic
to,
the general point
bound by rigorous orthodoxy.
THE GENTILE MISSION Gradually, then, as the disciples fouixd opposition to their activities in Jeru-
salem and Palestine, they shifted their attention to other communities in the eastern Mediterranean and to Rome itself, where they sought to convert Gentiles as well as Hellenized Jews.
These encounters naturally brought about further
It was not so much that conwere deliberately made to win Gentile converts, though this doubtless occurred. More important by far was the fact that the new audience, being
changes in the teachings of the Jesus movement.
cessions
unacquainted with the
finer points of
Judaism, understood the teachings of the
Soon these new interpretations became, to the confusion of later theologians, a part of Christian doctrine. Moreover, the converts themselves began to spread the good word, and among these new teachers were men whose backgrounds and temperaments were very different from those of the simple Galileans who had formed the nucleus of the movement. Of these newer teachers the greatest by far was St. Paul. He was not only the leader of the Gentile mission; it may be said that he, more than any other individual, was responsible for the development of Christianity, as a distinct religion, out of what has been called here the Jesus movement.
disciples in a very different fashion.
23 The
stricter
submission to this rite was necessary. There was also a movement itself a struggle between those who inGentile converts must submit to it and those (like St. Paul) who held it to be un-
Jews maintained that
full
struggle over circumcision within the Jesus sisted that all
necessary. See p. 45.
—
37
CHAPTER
2
Christianity:
The Formative
The Mysticism of Paul Perhaps the most significant thing about Paul's background is the fact that he was a Jew of the Diaspora, with the advantage of contact with Greek culture.
He was bom
in Tarsus, a
Greek
city in Cilicia, about the beginning of the
Christian era. His family,
who were
Roman
that
well-to-do and had the distinction of being he received an excellent education. In due course he was sent to Jerusalem to study imder the most distinguished rabbis of the day, and it is a sign of how much he had been exposed to non- Jewish influences, and so of how much he had to learn from his Jewish teachers, that he first read the Law in Greek translation, not in the original Hebrew. Paul was proud of his Jewish heritage. He was, he said, of the stock of Israel citizens,
saw
to
it
THE MYSTICISM OF PAUL
of the tribe of Benjamin, a
Hebrew
of Hebrews.^ Perhaps just because of his
rigorous background (Hke the parvenu noble
less
king), Paul
became exceedingly zealous
he found a stubborn
little
who
is
more royal than the
in "the traditions of
my
fathers."
When
group preaching the blasphemous and idolatrous
doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah, he eagerly joined in the eflFort the stricter Jews were making to destroy this wicked heresy. Indeed, if we are to believe his own later estimate, he surpassed most of his contemporaries in the fury with which he persecuted and ravaged the Jesus movement.''
PAUL'S VISION
Then one
Damascus on
day, as he traveled to
this
very business, he expe-
rienced a vision and was converted to the Jesus movement, whose message he straightway began to preach.
occasion are
full
The accoimts
in the Acts of this
of picturesque detail, but Paul's
own
version
momentous
extraordinarily
is
He said simply, "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me." There have been countless attempts to explain Paul's vision.^ Pious Christians have attributed it to the direct intervention of the Lord; equally fervent Freudians have said that Paul was a psychotic, suffering from sexual repression and a father abbreviated:
fixation.
Others have tried to accoimt for the vision on the basis of some per-
manent physical abnormality,
like epilepsy, or
fatigue so extreme as to result in hallucination. vision as a mirage. natives. it, it
But even
There
if
is
Still
disability, like
others have regarded the
not enough evidence to decide
we knew more
would seem more
some temporary
among
these alter-
concerning the circumstances surrounding
profitable to concentrate our attention
Paul's experience than to speculate about
—
were momentous not only in Paul's mind._Fnr Paul understood hJS '''^"^^
own '^f
its
life
causes.
The
on the
results of
results of the vision
but in the history of the Western
]^"^^, the
anointed of the Lord, not in
the narrowly Jewish sense of Jesus' disciples, but in the light of the wide r Hellenistic cultiire into
which he had been
bom and
which Jie^hadput^aside
when he went to Jerusalem to studv under the rabbis. That is to say, Paul naturally interpreted his mystical experience in the light bt~His knowledge of the mystery cults already popular and widespread in the East. Thus, though there seems to have been nothing mystical in the teachings of Jesus nor in the earliest interpretation of them, Paul understood the Jesus movement as a mystery religion. For him Jesus was less a Jewish Messiah than a resurrected God. Though he believed that the coming of the Kingdom was imminent, he envisaged it less as that final accounting on the day of judgment that Jesus had preached than as a spiritual state the individual's imion with his savior. Paul, then, shared that deep need for immortality, that sense of dependence
—
1
To Paul the important point was I
not seen Jesus Christ
one
bom
oiu-
out of due time."
that he
Lord?" and
I
had seen the Lord. Compare Corin. 15:8,
"And
last of all
I
Corin. 9:1,
"Have
he was seen of me,
as
39
40
CHRISTIANITY: THE FORMATIVE YEARS
an uncertain world, that was sweeping the imperial population and had already enormous popularity of such cults as those of Attis, Osiris, and Mithra. But because of his upbringing perhaps (who can say?) because he had
in
resulted in the
—
—
been engaged in an attempt to eradicate the Jesus movement the vision that appeared to him was not Attis or Mithra; it was Jesus. This meant that the actual teachings of Jesus, the Judaic background on which these teachings rested, and the opinions and attitudes of the disciples all underwent a radical transformation in Paul's hands. By making the Jesus movement understandable and acceptabl e to the Gentile world, by accomtrmdaHng it tn th^ baQic-^cul tural needs of the jime which he coul d_do precisely because those needs were also his nwn) Paul (
made
it
possible for an obscLire Jewish Messiah-cult to
become a wor)d
rel igion
THE LETTER TO THE ROMANS Paul's letter to the Christian
ment
community
at
Rome
contains a compact state-
of his message.
want you to understand, brothers, that I have often intended to come you ... to preach the good news to you at Rome also. For I am not ashamed of the good news, for it is God's power for the salvation of everyone who has faith, of the Jew first and then of the Greek. Suppose you call yourself a Jew, and rely on law, and boast about God .... Circumcision will help you only if you observe the Law; but if you are a lawbreaker, you might as well be uncircumcised. So if people who are uncircumcised observe the requirements of the Law, will they not be treated as though they were circumcised? And if, although they are physically uncircumcised, they obey the Law, they will condemn you, who break the Law, although you are circumcised. For the real Jew is not the man who is one outwardly, and the real circumcision is not something physical and external. The real Jew is the man who is one inwardly, and real circumcision I
to see
.
.
.
.
.
a matter of the heart, a spiritual, not a literal, thing.
is
What
does this mean? Are
we Jews
already charged Jews and Greeks sin.
As the Scripture
.
all
at a
.
.
.
disadvantage? Not at
alike with
all.
We
have
being under the control of
says,
"There is not a single man who is upright. No one understands, no one searches for God."
.
.
.
For no human being can be made upright in the sight of God by observing Law can do is to make man conscious of sin. But now God's way of uprightness has been disclosed without any reference to law, though the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it. It is God's way of uprightness and comes through having faith in Jesus Ghrist,^ and it is for the Law. All that the
2
[It is
significant of the transformation taking place that Paul speaks not simply of "Jesus" but
of "Jesus Christ." Christos (as
we have
is
but the Greek translation of "Messiah," which originally meant However, in calling Jesus "Messiah" the
seen) merely "anointed" or "designated."
disciples gradually
came
to
mean more than
that he
had been designated by Yahweh
to lead
THE MYSTICISM OF PAUL
who have
all
without distinction. For
faith,
men
all
sin
and come short of
mercy they are made upright for nothing, by the deliverance secured through Christ Jesus. For God showed him publicly dying as a sacrifice of reconciliation to be taken advantage of through the glory of God, but by his
faith.
.
.
.
is made upright by faith; the observance of the Law has nothing do with it. Does God belong to the Jews alone? Does he not belong to the heathen too? Of course he belongs to the heathen too; there is but one God, and he will make the circumcised upright on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised upright because of theirs. So as we have been made upright by faith, let us live in peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have been introduced through faith to the favor of God that we now enjoy, and let us glory in our hope For, through the holy Spirit that has been of sharing the glory of God.
A man
to
.
.
given
us,
moment
be seen that Paul
first
.
.
God's love has flooded our hearts. For
at the decisive
It will
.
.
when we were
still
helpless,
Christ died for us godless men.*^
made
then built up a mythical setting for
this
god and god out of the Jewish legends and stories
the historical Jesus into a savior
and Jesus, as Jews, knew in common. How, for instance, did we come and so to require the services of Christ the Savior? For answer Paul fell back on the old Jewish myth of the creation. God created Adam, the first man, free from sin. But Adam disobeyed his Maker, and we, his descendants, have inherited his sins. Just as the sin of one man (Adam) brought death and all our woe into the world, so the virtue of one man (Jesus) saves us; and just as Adam's sin was disobedience, so the virtue by which Jesus redeems the many that he to sin
is
obedience.
which through one man sin came into the world, and so death spread to all men, because all men sinned. ... So Adam foreshadowed the one who was to come. So as one offense meant condemnation for all men, just so one righteous act means acquittal and life for all men. For just as that one man's disobedience made the mass of mankind sinners, so this one's obedience will make the mass of them upright.** It is just like
the
way
and death followed
in
sin,
.
Because of our inheritance from
Adam we
are
all
corrupt,
but for God's mercy in sending His Son to be a sacrifice for
us.
and
so
.
.
doomed,
But though Paul
meant more than may be It is true that he seems the sexual aspect of life, and that
associated this corruption with "our sinful body," he
suggested by his reference to "the to
lusts of
the flesh."
have had an especially strong aversion to
the Jews to freedom. And when the Gentiles called Jesus "Christ" the word meant more to them than it did to the disciples: To the Gentiles, with their background in paganism and Eastern mysticism and their lack of interest in Hebrew nationalism, it meant "savior god"
41
42
CHRISTIANITY: THE FORMATIVE YEARS
he regarded all the various processes by which the body tion, and so on as either bad or low.
—
lives
— digestion, elimina-
When we were living mere physical lives the sinhil passions, awakened by the Law, operated through the organs of our bodies to make us bear fruit for death. But now the Law no longer applies to us; we have died to what once controlled the old
Though
it is
we have
we can now
serve in the
new
Spirit,
not under
—
—
how Paul and other ascetics too, of course could any bias against the "organs of the body" in Jesus' teachings
easy to see
find a sanction for (for, as
us, so that
letter.*"
seen, Jesus' sense of the
of the Kingdom caused him Judaism nor Jesus had connected
imminence
to give scant value to bodily activities), neither
And Paul was too good a Jew to condemn the had been fashioned by an all-good creator god. Hence, for Paul, sin had a more complex meaning and a wider reference than mere incontinence. Whereas conventional Judaism thought of sin as deviation from the letter of the Law and Jesus had thought of it as deviation from the spirit of the Law, Paul interpreted it in terms of a divided will. For Paul, the contrast between the flesh and the spirit was the contrast between a will that is torn and divided because it piu-sues conflicting ends and a will that is unified and free sin specifically
body wholly
because
with the "flesh."
— after
all, it
wholly dedicated to a higher end. Thus Paul adopted a metaphysical dualism not dissimilar to the dualism that was central to many of the mystery religions. Further, Paul believed that the it is
will remains divided, that
how much
corrupt, unless
is,
man
is
aided by outside powers.
No
matter
his
lower nature wins out and he chooses the bad. Without God,
the helpless spectator of his
am
man may
unaided
own
see,
and
in a sense
want
to do, the good,
man
is
thus
destruction.
I do not understand what I am doing, want to do; I do things that I hate. But if I do what I do not want to do, I acknowledge that the Law is right. In reality, it is not I that do these things; it is sin, which has possession of me. For I know that nothing good resides in me, that is, in my physical self; I can will, but I cannot do what is right. I do not do the good things that I want to do; I do the wrong things that I do not want to do. But if I do the things that I do not want to do, it is not I that am acting, it is sin, which has possession of me. I find the law to be that I who want to do right am dogged by what
I
for
is
I
physical, sold into slavery to sin.
do not do what
wrong.
My
I
inner nature agrees with the divine law, but
all
through
my
body I see another principle in conflict with the law of my reason, which makes me a prisoner to that law of sin that runs through my body. What a wretched man I am! Who can save me from this doomed body? Thank God! it is done through Jesus Christ our Lord! So mentally I am a slave to God's law, but physically to the law of sin.^
THE MYSTICISM OF PAUL
markedly from
All this differs
cism and dualism, but also in
its
Jesus' teachings, not only in
as Jesus thought about this point at
whom
the normal man,
working out it is
his
own
is
capable of
Who
—
felt
can save
asceti-
he seems to have taken
granted that
for
quite capable of
is
man
take as good care of his inner life
life as
law-abiding
— and he seems to have thought that any
this.
contrast, Paul
religions
extreme
problems. Jesus seems to have believed that for salvation
only necessary that
By
all,
Paul held to be utterly helpless,
Jews habitually took of their outer
man
its
sense of man's frustration and helplessness. Insofar
—
accordance with the sentiment of
in
the need of transcendental help.
me from
this
on the road to Damascus,
doomed body?"
"What
the mystery
man
I
am!
Paul, of course, found his answer
in the risen Christ. Jesus, as Paul
a kind of parallel, or model, of man. Just as
all
a wretched
man
is
understood him, was
a dualism of body and
spirit,
God-become-man, was a dualism nt the hiiTnan and th e divine In 15oth there is a tension between a lower and a higher principle, but in Jesus, unlike the unaided man, the higher principle won out. His resurrection was testimony to this. And this explains the overwhelming importance for Paul of the crucifixion and the resurrection, as compared with the other events of Jesus' life. The miracles and healings and castings out of demons that so stirred the original disciples interested him little. But the crucifixion showed that Jesus was truly a man, a man who died; the resvirrection, that he was a God with life so Je sus, the
eternal.
But not only did Jesus suffer as his resurrection to
How
can
this
be a promise
we
be? Here
we
suffer;
he suffered for
us,
and Paul held
our delivery from the body of this death. enter the heart of Paul's mystery. Just as the devotee to us of
was afforded immortality by identification with his god, so Paul that experience on the road to Damascus, had been vmited with
of Attis or Osiris felt that he, in
his Christ.
So there
is
no condemnation any more
for those
who
are in union with
Christ Jesus. For the life-giving law of the Spirit through Christ Jesus has
freed you from the
the
Law
to
do
it,
Law
of sin
hampered
as
and death. For though it was impossible for it was by our physical limitations, God, by
own Son in our sinful physical form, as a sin-offering put his condemnation upon sin through his physical nature, so that the requirement of the Law might be fully met in our case, since we live not on the physical but on the spiritual plane. People who are controlled by the physical think sending his
and people who are controlled by the spiritual think For to be physically minded means death, but to be spiritually minded means life and peace. For to be physically minded means hostility to God, for it refuses to obey God's law, indeed it cannot obey it. Those who are physical cannot please God. But you are not physical but of of
what what
is
physical,
is
spiritual.
spiritual, if
God's Spirit has really taken possession of you; for unless a
has Christ's
spirit,
he does not belong to Christ. But
if
Christ
is
in
man
your hearts,
43
44
CHRISTIANITY: THE FORMATIVE YEARS
though your bodies are dead consequence of uprightness.
consequence of
in .
.
sin,
your
spirits
have hfe
in
.
We know that in everything God works with those who love him, whom he has called in accordance with his purpose, to bring about what is good. For those whom he had marked out from the first he predestined to be made like his Son, so that he should be the eldest of many brothers; and those whom
he has predestined he calls, and those whom he calls he makes upright, and those whom he makes upright he glorifies. Then what shall we conclude from this? If God is for us, who can be against us? Will not he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, with that
gift
whom God
give us everything?
Who can bring any accusation against those
God pronounces them upright; who can condemn who died, or rather who was raised from the dead, is at
has chosen?
them? Christ Jesus
God's right hand, and actually pleads for Christ's love?
Can
tion or danger or the sword?
For
us.
Who
can separate us from
trouble or misfortune or persecution or hunger or destitu.
.
.
am
convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor their hierarchies nor the present nor the future nor any supernatural forces either of height or depth nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from I
the love
God
has shown in Christ Jesus our Lordl^
Thus, for Paul, to be saved was to be united with Christ, and salvation was not something that occurred in the future, after one's physical death. take place diiring this hfe, for the believer was
made over
It
could
new man. we too may
into a
Just
"was raised from the dead through the Father's glory, live For when he died, he became once for all dead to sin; the life a new life. he now lives is a life in relation to God. So you also must think of yourselves as dead to sin but alive to God, through union with Christ Jesus." That one could indeed be saved was not just a promise, according to Paul. It had actually happened suddenly and dramatically in his own life. The death from which he had been saved was the sinful life he had been living. Before the great event that occurred on the road to Damascus, he was a slave to his body and its lusts. After this event, he experienced a marvelous freedom from bodily desires. These were psychological facts that Paul accounted for by saying as Jesus
.
.
.
'^
—
that Christ
now
lived in him: "It
—
is
not
I
that live, but Christ that liveth in me.'
THE MYSTICAL UNION WITH CHRIST on mystical imion with Christ was a radical departure from the its emphasis on obedience to the Law. The true believer, according to the Jews, was grateful to Yahweh and followed his comPaul's focus
old worship of Yahweh, with
mands. The true believer, according to Paul, is identical with his crucified Lord, dies with him, and is resiirrected with him. What dies in the believer who through faith shares Jesus'
death on the cross
is
— the sense
the flesh and the lusts thereof
of restriction and failure and compulsion.
What
is
bom
in the believer's identi-
THE MYSTICISM OF PAUL
fication
with the resurrected Christ
is
a
new freedom
that transforms this earthly
existence. Paul expressed this in his statement that "Christ
ransomed us from
The Law, Paul argued, had been given men as a rule to follow before the coming of Jesus. And, like a schoolmaster whose stem and rigorous discipline only causes his pupils to become more stubborn, the Law failed to the Law's ciu-se."
reform mankind.
Men
either simply ignored
it
or, if
they followed
what the Law could not us on the cross.
a grudging and resentful spirit. But
by sending His Son But
now
to die for
that faith has come,
we
do,
it,
did so in
God accomplished
are no longer in the charge of the
attendant. For in Christ Jesus you are
all
sons of
God through your
faith.
you who have been baptized into union with Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no room for "Jew" and "Greek"; there is no room for "slave" and "freeman"; there is no room for "male" and "female"; for in union with Christ Jesus you are all one.' For
all of
This view was naturally attacked by the
movement
— those who, adhering
strict
strictly to Jesus'
Judaizing branch of the Jesus
own
conception of the scope
was limited to Jews and to those Gentiles who submitted to the rite of circiuncision and followed the other ceremonial demands of the Law.^ Had the stricter sect won out, Christianity would have been closed to the great majority of men. Did Paul take his position against circumcision deliberately, because he saw that only by relaxing the requirement could the Jesus movement become a world religion? This may well be the case. Certainly, he was a missionary, imbued with a missionary fervor to spread the of his mission, insisted that salvation
gospel.
Of
course, there
were
religious considerations, as well as possible propa-
Law. It was not his observance had saved him; it was the vision vouchsafed on the road to Damascus. It was nothing he had done; it was something that happened to him. What is important, he naturally concluded, is not what one does or leaves luidone but the faith that unites one to Jesus. Hence the character of his mystical experience committed him to a position that made the Gentile mission possible. If the strict constructionalists opposed Paul's teaching on this point, some of his converts actually abused it. It is obviously a view that is easy to abuse. If faith means a new birth, and new birth means perfect freedom, why should the reborn not do as they please? Moreover, if faith means salvation, the faithful need no longer fear the consequences of their acts. The purpose of Paul's letter to the Galatians seems to have been not only to silence the strict constructionalists but also to condemn those who went to gandistic ones, that led Paul to abrogate the of the
Law
that
the other extreme.
3 This was a matter of heated debate in the young Christian communities. See, for instance, Acts 11:2, in which the disciple Peter is obliged to defend himself against the charge of those who may be called the strict constructionalists that he has eaten with uncircumcised persons.
45
46
CHRISTIANITY: THE FORMATIVE YEARS
For you, brothers, have been called freedom an excuse for the physical. .
I
mean
this:
Live by the
Spirit,
.
to freedom; only
do not make your
.
and then you
will not indulge \'our physical
cravings. For the physical cravings are against the Spirit, of the Spirit are against the physical; the
cannot do anything you please. clear
enough
.
.
.
The
two are
and the cravings
in opposition, so that
you
things our physical nature does are
— immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity,
dnmken-
quarreling, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party-spirit, env)',
and the like. I warn you as I did before that people who do such things will have no share in the Kingdom of God. But what the Spirit ness, carousing,
produces
is
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentle-
ness, self-control. If
we
live
In other words, a
been if he
truly converted
.
by the
.
.
be guided bv the
Spirit, let us
man who
hves in the
— can no
spirit
Spirit. >
— who has real
who
faith,
has
longer do, or even want to do, evil deeds. For
he will also walk in the spirit. To walk in the be united with Christ, means to love God. Love of God so fills the heart of this "new man"^ that it crowds out every other motive and gives even his most ordinary acts new meaning. really lives in the spirit,
spirit, to
For just as there are many parts united in our human bodies, and the parts do not all have the same fimction, so, many as we are, we form one body through union with Christ, and we are individually parts of one another. We have gifts that differ with the favor that God has shown us, whether it is that of preaching, ... or of practical service, ... or [that of] the teacher
who
exercises his gift in teaching, the speaker, in his exhortation, the giver
of charity, with generosity, the office-holder, with devotion, the one
Your love must be genuine.
acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.
.
.
who does
.^
And so we come to the thirteenth chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians, its poem of love: No matter what knowledge, beauty, strength, oi wisdom we may have, it is nothing without love. "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have ... all knowledge and though I have all faith, so that I could remove momitains, and have not love I am nothing. And though with
bestow all my goods to feed the poor and though and have not love it proliteth me nothing." Love I
virtues: "it envieth not, itself
unseemly,
hopeth
all
.
things,
.
.
vaunteth not
thinketh no
endureth
all
evil,
.
.
is
give
my body
p. 41.
be burned,
all
the other
not puffed up, doth not behave
beareth
all things,
believeth
is
Jesus'.
all things,
But the love of which Paul speaks
not Jesus' love of Yahweh, nor yet his love of his neighbor;
4 See
to
the soiu-ce of
things."
This emphasis on inner morality is
.
itself, is
I
it
is
a mystic
THE MYSTICISM OF PAUL
love of the crucified Christ. Jesus,
And
to love, Paul
hope and expectation of the promised
love, these three, but the greatest of these
added
salvation. is
faith
"Now
and hope abideth
— faith in
faith,
hope,
love."
PAULS MARTYRDOM This
is
eloquent preaching, and Paul was a great missionary. His was not
the mysticism of ecstatic contemplation;
it
overflowed in energetic action.
Up
and down the land he went, teaching and preaching, and when he could not go, he wrote. He had constantly to meet bitter attacks from enemies and, what was perhaps worse, to correct the backsliding of newly won converts. He was mobbed, imprisoned, persecuted "I bear on my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Finally, in Jerusalem, things came to a head. "The high priest and the chief of the Jews" haled him, as they had earlier haled Jesus, before the Roman governor, charging that he was "a pestilent fellow, a mover of sedition among
—
all
the Jews throughout the world; a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes,
who
The Jews would have preferred was a Roman citizen and it was impossible, however much his Jewish enemies desired it, to deal with him quickly. He was imprisoned first at Caesarea and then, after shipwreck and divers other adventures, at Rome. There, after a long period of imprisonment, he was tried, sentenced, and executed, probably in 62 a.d. also hath
gone about
to profane the temple."
to deal with the case themselves, but Paul
PAULINE CHRISTIANITY
so
Paul was a mystic and a missionary, not a philosopher. Why, then, devote attention, in a history of philosophy, to his views? The answer is that
much
views became a part of the subject matter of philosophy, not only in the Middle Ages but even in modem times. Both the specific problems philosophers have dealt with and their ways of dealing with them have been deeply influenced by Paul. Such was the intensity of his vision on the road to Damascus, and such the strength of his personality, that his version of Jesus survived. Of course, it should not be inferred that it occurred to Paul that what he preached was his
We can see, however, that Paul's temperament and his background were largely responsible for his understanding of the vision. If he had not lived, or if he had been a Jew of Jerusalem, it is doubtful that Christianity would have developed into a world religion. If he had been a Greek, not a Jew, the religion he fathered would probably have
a "version" of Jesus. particular cultural
—
been just another Eastern mystery cult an ethical and metaphysical dualism to which was attached the notion of a savior god dying for his worshipers. Because he was a Jew, and a Jew of the Diaspora, he superimposed a mystery cult on a Judaic base. It is precisely because his understanding of Jesus' message was
compounded
of so
the — traditional Judaism, the Messiah — that his teaching of the message had so universal
many elements
mystery of a resurrected god
cult,
47
48
CHRISTIANITY: THE FORMATIVE YEARS
an appeal. On the other hand, since these diverse elements did not perfectly fuse, the problem of synthesizing them into a consistent view was a formidable legacy that Paul
left to
subsequent generations.
For instance, later Christians were forced to examine the question of the relative importance of faith and of works in effecting salvation. Though Paul repeatedly affirmed faith as the means to mystic identification with Christ, he
—
also emphasized the importance of works of the sacramental rites, specifically baptism and the Eucharist. Whatever these ceremonies may have meant to other
he was by the Eastern mysteries, was obvious. In many of the mystery sects, as we have seen, there was a baptism either in blood or in water by which the initiate's sins were purged away and a sacrificial meal in which the body of the slain god was eaten and by means of which his eternal life was communicated to the worshiper.® Thus there are side by side in Paul's teaching two quite contradictory theses: one that salvation is magical (that is, follows automatically from the performance of certain rites), the other that it is spiritual (that is, more a matter of internal change than of merely external rituals). Christian apologists have tried to minimize the magical element in Paul's view and have even held that it was precisely the absence of this element that first-generation Christians,^ to Paul, influenced as their significance
distinguished his mystic Christianity from the mystery cults of the East.
would deny
that Paul
had a much clearer
On
insight into the
meaning
No one
of salvation
must be allowed both that he it and saw (as he usually did) that salvation lies in an attitude of mind rather than in magic rites. The difference between Paul and the cultists on this point is one of degree, not one of kind. It is not that Paul brought something new into the world, but rather that, though his Christian mysticism and the Oriental mysticisms alike had their higher and lower moments, in Paul's view the higher moments tended than the
cultists had.
the other hand,
it
occasionally lapsed into magic and that they occasionally rose above
to predominate.
But even taking Paul at his higher moments, there is a conflict in his teaching between faith and works: If, as Paul said, "A man is not justified by the works of the Law but by the faith of Jesus Christ," what is the role of the various sacraments the Church administers? It is easy to see why this became a vital question of Church doctrine. Salvation by faith is an individual matter; mystical identification with Christ is a private relationship between the believer and his God, and the Church, seen from this vantage point, is simply a spiritual commu-
5 The ceremony of the Last Supper, for instance, probably originated as a commemorative meal and only gradually took on a sacramental character.
6 Naturally,
this parallelism
was making claims
did not disturb Paul; but one hundred years
to uniqueness
later,
when
and coming to view the other Eastern mysteries
Christianity
dangerous caused the Church intense embarrassment. Of the many explanations offered by the Church fathers, perhaps the most ingenious wa.s that of TertuHian, who claimed that the devil, rivals,
as
it
foreseeing that these Christian rites were to be instituted, deliberately imitated that confusion might ensue.
them
in
order
THE MYSTICISM OF PAUL
by the common
relation in which they stand to their an expression of religious individualism. But those who thought of the Church as an organization and an institution naturally had to insist both on formal requirements for membership and on a
nity of believers united
savior. This point of view, obviously,
is
proper sense of subordination to ecclesiastical authority. From this point of view the sacraments have an essential function. Eventually this conflict over salvation by faith or by works, first adumbrated by Paul, became a fundamental issue
on which, at the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, Catholic Christendom splintered. Another point in Paul's teaching that was to cause grave dispute was his doctrine of "original sin," as it was later called. Paul probably did not recognize this aspect of his thought as a "doctrine," for he did not think in such terms. But his letter to the Romans was laden with trouble for future theologians. Before his conversion, Paul was acutely conscious of his sin, that is, of his inability to choose to do those things that he believed he ought to choose. He did not believe that he was unique in this respect. On the contrary, he held that "All alike [are] under the control of sin." This conception of the innate sinfulness of man was not only an outgrowth of personal experience; it allowed Paul to magnify Christ's role. The less capable men are of saving themselves, the more essential Christ's death and resurrection become. Paul, for his part, was content to attribute this universal sinfulness and helplessness of man to Adam's disobedience.^ But though Adam's sin was doubtless "original," both in the sense of being the first ever committed and in the sense of being the source of
all
subsequent sirming, later theologians could hardly
avoid the questions Paul's formula raised:
And why that
did
Adam's
all-powerful suffering
God inflict them sin
somehow
God
with
How
did
men
inherit
Adam's
sin?
And, even allowing men, why did an all-knowing and
this terrible inheritance?
explains that of
all
permit him to sin in the
humanity has experienced in
its
first
place and so to cause
all
the
long history?
Adam's disobedience, how And why, if those who are saved contribute nothing to their salvation, should they be chosen and others be left to their fate? In his letter to the Romans Paul wrote that God has "marked out" and "predestined" some for salvation. Is it not unjust first to condemn all future generations for something their first parents did and then to exempt from this condemnation a few who are indistinguishable morally or otherwise from all the rest? In this way the problem of free will emerged as one of the central themes of subsequent philosophizing. Moreover,
if
men
are truly helpless because of
can they be held responsible for the
sins
they commit?
Finally, Paul held that Christ the Savior
is
the son of that monotheistic
whom
he also believed. But what exactly does this mean? Paul was not very explicit on this point. In one place he said that "though he possessed That the nature of God," Christ Jesus "did not grasp at equality with God.
Yahweh
in
.
7 See p. 41.
.
.
49
50
CHRISTIANITY: THE FORMATIVE YEARS
is
whv God
odiers
.
.
has so greatlv exalted hini, and given him die
."'
.
name above
AnoUier passage suggests that Paul thought of Christ
as a
all
kind
who will disappear when his work is done: "After that will when [Christ] will turn over the kingdom to God his Father. And when everything is reduced to subjection to him, then the Son himself will also become subject to him who has reduced everything to subjection to him, so that God may be ever\"thing to everyone.'"™ of vicero\" or agent
come
the .
.
end,
.
The question
of the nature of this fihal relation did not trouble Paul himself
\'ision. But it was the source of trouble on when philosophers and theologians attempted to rationalize the Christian mystery and to find a logical formula to reconcile the divine Son with the
because of the perfect clarity of his later
monotheistic Father.
John and
the Logos Mystery
THE PROBLEM OF THE INCARNATION
we have
So far
considered only one of several problems resulting from the
—
claim that Jesus was divine the problem of how to reconcile his Godhead with the monotheistic Yahweh. But, assuming this puzzle to be somehow solved,
new
there
is still
human this
a question about
being, the
man
how and why
Jesus, son of
divinit\'
came
to reside in a particular
Joseph the carpenter of Nazareth. With
puzzle Paul, as usual, was blissfullv unconcerned.
was enough for him laid it aside God, other men."° Others, however, It
that Christ the Savior, "though he possessed the natiue of
.
.
.
on the nature of a slave and become like tried to go behind Paul's certaint\" about the fad of the incarnation, asking how and when it occurred. Some maintained that the divine spark entered the man Jesus at his birth; some pushed the moment further back and held that Jesus had no hmnan father but was conceived of the Holy Ghost. In all these the in-dwelling of accounts, however, the crucial problem of the incarnation to take
divinit\" in
To
this
—
—
human form remained. problem the unknown author
of the Gospel according to John^ tiuned
his attention.
In the beginning the
Word was It
Word^
The
existed.
A\'ord
was with God, and the
divine.
was he
that
was with God
in the
existence through him. and apart from
beginning. Evervthing
him nothing came
to be.
8 For a discussion of the complex question of the authorship and date of this gospel, see son. The Gospel According to St. John Collier, New York. 1962), pp. 15-28. 9 [The term translated as "Word" is the Greek logos aithor.] i
—
came
into
It
was b\
.\.
Richard-
JOHN AND THE LOGOS MYSTERY
him The
that Hfe light
came
is still
into existence,
and that
life
was the Hght
of
mankind.
shining in the darkness, for the darkness has never put
it
out.
There appeared
He came come
man by
a
the
name
of John,^° with a
message from God. might
to give testimony, to testify to the light, so that everyone
to believe in
it
through him.
He was
not the light; he
came
to testify
to the light.
The
upon everyone, was just coming into and though the world came into existence through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to his home, and his own family did not welcome him. But to all who did receive him and believe in him he gave the right to become children of God, owing their birth not to nature nor to any human or physical impulse, but to God. So the Word became flesh and blood and lived for a while among us, abounding in blessing and truth, and we saw the honor God had given him, which sheds
real light,
the world.
He came
light
into the world,
such honor as an only son receives from his father.
No one
has ever seen God;
his Father's breast, that has
it
is
.
.
.
the divine Only Son,
who
leans
upon
made him known."
JOHN'S AND PAUL'S VIEWS COMPARED John, as this author has been named by tradition, moved in a different world from that of Paul. "Word," or logos, is a technical term drawn from Greek philosophy, and the concept it signifies was foreign both to the mystery cults and to ancient Judaism. Yet in some respects, it is clear, the views of John and Paul were very similar. To begin with, though neither had had the advantage of knowing Jesus personally, each had had an intense mystical experience that he regarded as an adequate substitute for personal acquaintance and that strongly colored his conception of the Christian message. In the second place, they agreed in some important respects about the content of this message. Both were Jews,
on the old Judaic conception of Yahweh, yet both held promised to man is open to all, Jew and Gentile alike, who that the salvation ^^ They agreed, too, that this promised salvation their savior. have faith in Jesus as
and based
is
their religion
not continued existence in time;
frustration,
and defeat
is
lifted
Anything you ask so that the Father
it is
a rebirth in which the weight of
and the believer
for as followers of
feels himself a
mine [John has
may be honored through
the Son.
new man:
Jesus say] I
sin,
I
will grant,
will grant anything
you ask me for as my followers. If you really love me, you will observe my commands. And I will ask the Father and he will give you another Helper to be with you always. It is the Spirit of Truth. The world cannot obtain it, because it does not
author]
1
[This
1 1
Compare, "For while the Law was given through Moses, blessing and truth came
is,
of course, a reference to John the Baptist
Jesus Christ" (John
1
:
17).
to us through
51
52
CHRISTIANITY: THE FORMATIVE YEARS
see
or recognize
it
you.
.
.
it;
you recognize
it
because
it
stays with
you and
is
within
.
Anyone who loves me will observe my teaching, and my Father him and we will come to him and live with him.P
will love
John rose above the provincialism of the original Jesus movement because, he interpreted the message and the personality of Jesus from the broader perspective of non-Jewish thought. But John's backgroimd was different from that of Paul: His mysticism was not the mysticism of the Eastern religious like Paul,
but that of Hellenistic Alexandria. John, that
is to say, was more philosophiand brought to the developing Jesus movement his imderstanding of current philosophical concepts. For him, Christ Jesus was not Paul's resurrected God; he was at once more exalted and
cults
cally oriented than the apostle of the Gentiles
more
abstract
— the logos of Hellenistic philosophy.
ORIGINS OF THE LOGOS DOCTRINE
The
had faint beginnings in Heraclitus and a further Along with their universal materialism the Stoics had affirmed the existence of a creative and generative force, which they had called the logos and had conceived to be in some fashion divine. Two thousand years later, what the Stoics wrote about their logos sounds very vague. But it had a great appeal for late antiquity and in one way or another powerfully influenced much of the philosophical and religious thought of that time, including that of some Jewish sects. logos conception
development
in Stoicism.
Typical of this Hellenistic strain in Judaism
Jew
who may be
of the Diaspora. Philo,
the cosmopolitan Jews of the Empire,
is
the theory of Philo,
still
another
taken as a distinguished example of
was a member of the Jewish colony of
Alexandria, one of the centers of logos-thinking. ^2 Although a younger contem-
porary of Jesus, he appears never to have heard of him. Philo's aim, therefore, was not to bring the Jesus movement up to date but to harmonize Judaism with current intellectual trends. Yet, in making in Alexandria,
Yahweh
philosophically respectable
he unknowingly provided the basis for a further development
of Christianity.
In early times,
seemed
when Yahweh was conceived
close to his people:
He walked
discoursed with his prophets in
human
with
of anthropomorphically, he
Adam
dav and however, anthropo-
in the cool of the
fashion. Later on,
morphism faded out and Yahweh became so majestic and cosmic a god that was difficult to conceive of him in any intimate relation with man. Then the need was felt to bring him back, somehow, into relation with man, but
it
without destroying his
1
new
transcendence. This was, of course, not a problem
2 Neoplatonism, which has already been discussed (pp. 6-18), was, of course, a
ment
in the
same philosophical
milieu.
later develop-
JOHN AND THE LOGOS MYSTERY
Hebrew religion. As has already been noted, all over the Mediterranean world in the closing centuries of the classical period men sought to get closer to their gods.^^ Indeed, this desire was one of the signs that an era was peculiar to the
showed that the old classical culture, with its emphasis on self-respect, autonomy, and independence, was disappearing. who contemAristotle's completely transcendent god, perfect and removed even hatred for the love, or no pity, plates only his own nature and has classical times. emerged in late world did not satisfy the new man who For many Jews the solution was to introduce intermediary beings between the transcendent Yahweh and his created world, and the later Hebrew scriptures are full of angelic agents of Yahweh's will. But the angelic hosts with which imaginative and poetic minds bridged the chasm between the divine and the hvmian hardly satisfied Philo's more abstract intellect. He therefore adapted the currently popular notion of the logos to serve the same purpose. ^^ To oversimplify a complex matter, it may be said that though Philo, as a Jew, naturally had to reject the Stoics' claim that the logos is material and divine, he clung to their notion of it as dynamic. He held it, in fact, to be the agency by which the creative Yahweh operates and by which this transcendent god reveals himself ending; like the
demand
for a savior,
it
—
—
^^ to the world.
JOHN'S ACCOUNT OF THE LOGOS So
much
and
for Philo
his version of the logos doctrine. It
was easy
for
John to interpret the logos to the advantage of Christianity, thus making the new religion philosophically respectable among the learned of the day ^or John,
was simply the e ternal and divine^Jn gns. which took on human^ "shape— which acquired local habitation, as it were at a particular point in space and time: in Palestine during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius Caesar. How did this come about? This is a mystery about which, simply, we must have faith. Why did it come about? Here John had an answer, expressed in terms Jesus
—
1
3 See pp. 2-6.
1
4 The
1
Neoplatonists' solution to this problem was similar: the affirmation of a whole series of emanations that serve as mediations between the purity and majesty of the One and the unreal
sensible world. See p. 15. 5 For both these functions of Philo's logos there is support in the Jewish scriptures, providing one is prepared to interpret them loosely. In numerous passages the old Hebrew writers speak, for instance, of God's word (or, in Greek, logos): "By the word of the Lord were the heavens ." (Ps. 107:20); "I have ." (Ps. 33:6); "The Lord sent his word and healed them made .
slain
.
.
them by the word
of
my mouth"
(Hos. 6:5).
Or
again, in
.
Gen. 1:3
it is
written that
Yahweh
."—that is, he did not perform his creative act with his hands, like a "Let there be potter works on clay, but with his word alone. Philo also found it possible to identify the frequent references to the wisdom of the Lord, for example, "The Lord by his wisdom hath founded the earth" (Prov. 3 19), or "Oh Lord how manifold are thy works, in wisdom thou hath made them" (Ps. 104 24), with his logos. That these writers meant by their statements nothing remotely like Philo's subtle doctrine was, from Philo's point of view, quite irrelevant: These old writers were wiser than they knew; the logos was speaking through them in ways they did not imderstand! By this method, of course, it is possible to make anything mean everything.
said,
.
:
:
.
53
54
CHRISTIANITY: THE FORMATIVE YEARS
need of
of his o\vn acute
salvation:
only begotten Son (the logos, that the world that through
Here John gave
his
God
is;
so loved the
him the world might be
own
Philo about the logos was
its
world that
He
sent His
divine but dependent on God) into
itself
saved.
twist to the logos doctrine.
What had
interested
metaphysical and epistemological functions.
It
not
minds so that we can understand the world. ^^ For John, however, the redemptive activity of the logos was primary. The sense of personal inadequacy and the corresponding need of external support only creates the world;
it
that John shared with so
Though the
also illumines our
many men
of his time explains this shift of emphasis.
had emphasized divine providence, they had thought of it in a highly abstract way: For them it was a principle, not a person. But as a Jew, John had behind him the Judaic Yahweh, a personal god and a father. His sense of the fatherhood of God and the sonship of the logos dominates the whole of the Fourth Gospel. What is more, this interpretation enabled him to ." see the motive for the incarnation as paternal love: "God so loved the world Stoics
.
is
one of the most treasured, because
the
New
it
Testament. The logos became
not to pimish us but to save
is
one of the most reassuring,
flesh
not to judge us but to redeem
What were
is
us,
us.
In emphasizing the loving-kindness and tender
John actually
.
lines of
added nothing new
to the old
mercy
of
God
the Father,
Hebraic conception of the deity. ^^
unique about John's position is that Yahweh's sternness and wrath, which prominent features of the Jewish view, are altogether missing from
also
the picture. In the tion of one
first
was doubtless simply the individual interpretamercy and forgiveness. But because of the and because, too, his God of love foimd John's name^^
place, this
who needed
canonical authority of
a
God
of
—
—
an echo in many another heart this personal interpretation, along with the logos doctrine with which it was fused in John's mind, passed into the future Church.
7776 Effects
of Institutionalism
formative influences at work in the development two inspired and highly original personalities whose chief influence was in the sphere of doctrine has been considered. Now a different kind of influence must be considered the influence that institutional growth had on Christian doctrine and practice.
Thus
far in the study of the
of Christianity the impact of
—
1 1 1
6 Compare the Neoplatonists' interpretation of Plato's Form of the Good, pp. 8-9. 7 See pp. 27-28. 8 For the early Christians, of course, the author of the Fourth Gospel was the apostle John, "the beloved disciple."
THE EFFECTS OF INSTITUTIONALISM
The
effects of institutionalism are not, of course, confined to Christianity;
they occur whenever an informal
down
to
movement
loses its first spontaneity
and
settles
an organizational existence. But, as will be seen,^^ the concept of
all the normal institutional pressures in the case of Chrisand made them even more important factors in its development than they are in that of most organizations. A movement often starts with a few dedicated individuals whose enthusiasm and fervor attract others to their cause whether this be political, economic, social, or religious. But the success of the movement in attracting members causes it to undergo a transformation. For instance, the "message" of the founders, which gives the movement its initial impetus, is often misunderstood and always altered by their successors. Yet this process of vulgarization and simplification at the hands of lesser men makes institutional existence and acceptance by the
orthodoxy aggravated
tianity
—
many
possible.
WHAT THE MESSAGE GAINED AND Thus it was inevitable that the and even the simpler but equally modification as the Jesus
comprehend the notion with the divine logos.
by Paul and John, would undergo Only a mystic could
esoteric messages taught spiritual
message of
Jesus,
movement became institutionalized.
of salvation as identity with the resurrected
Men who were
the miracle of redemption
who did not Law had to
LOST
God
or
not mystics had to find ways of explaining
— and ways, too,
of securing
it
for themselves.
Men
themselves experience Paul's sense of release from bondage to the find rules to live by.
Men who
did not share John's sense of the
had to find sterner sanctions for the life of Christian piety they believed God wished them to lead. Paul's conception of salvation as an inner change effected in this life through Father's overflowing love
identification with Christ Jesus
to
happen
in the distant future.
became the notion
And
spiritual (the believer continues to live in this
of
it),
of something that
is
going
which was essentially world, though he is no longer
his otherworldliness,
degenerated into the belief that the Christian ought to separate himself
—
world physically. The net result of all this of the pressures of was that there gradually developed, beside mysticism and the logos doctrine, which the Church did not and could not repudiate, quite a different set of beliefs. They included an appeal to the magic of the sacraments (from which, as we have seen, Paul himself was not wholly free), a new and from
this
institutionalization
—
rigorously ascetic law (an attempt to put Jesus' radical interim ethics literally into practice),
on love and
and a worship based on
fear of
God and
of hell fire instead of
identification with the divine.
Movements tend to be radical and extreme. As they are institutionalized, become conservative and resist the very excitement and ferment that gave
they
1
9 See pp. 60-69.
55
56
CHRISTIANITY: THE FORMATIVE YEARS
This is almost inevitable. An institution constitutes a lot of men; needed to reduce the number of separate decisions that are made and minimize the chances of contradictory policies' being initiated in different
jljeaaJairdj.^'^
rules are
so to
parts of the organization. But rules are perforce designed for the general case,
and since
all
institution
is
to
actual cases are particular, the rule never exactly
fits.
Hence an
generally insensitive to nuances, slow to move, loath to adjust
itself
changing circumstances. There is, therefore, always a tension between an institution and that rare
That
creature, a genuine individual.
is,
which
institutions develop.
He
there will always be conflict between
man who
a mature institution and the kind of
founds the movements out of
has ideas, but the institution fears ideas; he
proposes novelties, but the institution dreads change. Most of us probably
sympathize with the
in